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A rough draft of the teetering startup landscape heading into Q2 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 11 | signals about the value of technology companies, the stinging cost of slowing growth at tech concerns, and several ancillary signals from the more speculative regions of the tech market sum to a dramatically changed market. It’s worth remembering just how wild the last two years have been in startup land. Back in early 2020, as the pandemic barreled into a number of sectors, . The cuts were so frequent that a tracker was built to keep tabs on the carnage. Then, as we all recall, investors realized that the tech industry was going to excel during a period of working from home, and here at TechCrunch, we swapped tabulating the latest startup staffing cuts for tracking an accelerating IPO market. How things have changed. For example, if you bought bitcoin one year ago, you’re sitting on more than 30% losses today. As we explored earlier this week, . In less speculative areas, there are still signs of a slowdown. Klarna’s 2021 numbers indicate that the BNPL market, a huge startup focus around the world, . So much so that we could see more combinations in the space as the number of BNPL players surpasses what the market might be able to carry. The IPO market is another downward signal, with the upcoming calendar of public-market debuts looking essentially barren. Mobileye, yes, will go out, but — though we will be watching. EV companies are after they failed to meet 2021 investor targets or 2022 projections. And investors have decided that a host of the hottest tech companies in the world — the GitLabs, HashiCorps, and other former startups that sell to developers — . We’re also seeing a return of the need to track staffing cuts at richly funded startups. Looking at recent headlines, we’ve seen layoffs at Hyperscience ( , ); WeDoctor ( , ); and OkCredit ( , ). Indeed, notes that the pace of startup layoffs has risen recently, partially due to after its market crumbled from underneath it. The stakes are not getting lower. This week we saw DocuSign get its valuation whacked after posting slower-than-expected growth guidance. So what, right? We’ve seen that enough times in recent months; we’ve covered the issue to near-death. |
European lawmakers launch investigation into use of Pegasus spyware by EU states | Zack Whittaker | 2,022 | 3 | 11 | The European Parliament voted on Thursday to create a new “committee of inquiry” to investigate allegations that European member states acquired and used the powerful Pegasus mobile spyware. Lawmakers voted largely in favor to create the committee, which will investigate the use of Pegasus and other surveillance spyware across the 27 member states of the European Union. A committee of inquiry allows lawmakers to investigate possible breaches of European law. In , the European Parliament said the committee “is going to look into existing national laws regulating surveillance, and whether Pegasus spyware was used for political purposes against, for example, journalists, politicians and lawyers.” Pegasus is a powerful mobile spyware developed by Israeli company NSO Group that can gain to data on a target’s device. NSO is one of the more prolific and known spyware makers on , allowing governments and law enforcement access to device data by exploiting security flaws and weaknesses in their device’s software. But researchers have consistently found that members of civil society — journalists, activists and human rights defenders — have been targeted by governments using the Pegasus spyware, despite assurances that only serious criminals and terrorists are targeted. The formation of the committee comes less than a month after the European Data Protection Supervisor called for on the use of Pegasus and other mobile spyware, fearing an “unprecedented level of intrusiveness,” citing reports that the spyware was deployed in two EU member states, Hungary and Poland. In January, researchers at Citizen Lab found evidence that critics of Poland’s ruling party, including opposition lawmaker Krzysztof Brejza, . Text messages stolen from Brejza’s phone were subsequently leaked, doctored and broadcast on state-controlled television, after which he lost the election by a close margin. Brejza has since accused the Polish government of interfering with the election. Researchers have also reported Pegasus infections in France, Germany and Spain. Per Europe’s rules, the European Parliament’s Pegasus committee will run for one year but can be extended by up to six months. |
Truphone says Russian tycoon Abramovich, sanctioned in the UK, does not have a ‘relevant interest’ that impacts Truphone stake | Ingrid Lunden | 2,022 | 3 | 11 | Roman Abramovich, the Russian oligarch who owns the highly successful Chelsea Premier League football club, this week saw his club assets seized as part of the U.K. government’s on him and others because of Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. So far, however, his ties to technology are being touched. — which has disclosed raising over $200 million from two funds that each count Abramovich as their main financial contributor and effectively counts those two funds as its majority owners — said that the sanctions currently do not impact its business, nor its shareholdings, because his link to the company is “indirect.” “We are aware that sanctions were imposed on 10 March by the UK Government on Roman Abramovich, who has an indirect link to Truphone,” Rachel Chapman, general counsel for Truphone Limited, said in a statement provided to TechCrunch. “However, Mr Abramovich does not have a relevant ‘interest’ for the purpose of UK sanctions legislation in Truphone. This means the Truphone business can continue to operate as usual. It should be emphasized that Truphone is not subject to any sanctions. We are taking legal advice and constantly monitoring the situation.” The fact that the startup’s two largest shareholders are effectively investment vehicles for Abramovich, yet are an arm’s length away from Abramovich himself, highlights both how tricky it is to trace funding in the world of tech; and specifically the difficulties of untangling “direct” versus “indirect” investments, and thus what is impacted officially and unofficially by sanctions. Abramovich has made a series of investments in Truphone — a communications technology company that develops eSIM and other technology to enable global voice and data connectivity that bypasses traditional networks — via investment vehicles that are funded by him, covering several years. In 2013, his firm Minden led a , accounting for £70 million of that sum. In 2018, it received (£18 million up front and the rest on a “conditional basis” to come through later), this time through two Abramovich firms, Minden and Vollin Holdings. Then, in 2020, it received a , again from Vollin and Minden. According to , Vollin owns 72.45% of Truphone, and Minden owns 22.77%, and its database does not list any other active investments for either firm. The company was last valued at $516 million in 2020. (Sidenote: When we covered those investments, Truphone aimed to keep a lower profile of the details around the investment firms: I recall getting slightly panicked calls from the PRs asking me not to name him in the articles, and then trying to downplay his involvement. Not fishy at all.) Abramovich had that Chelsea FC was being put up for sale in light of the situation and that he would make a donation to Ukrainian relief. That process was by the government yesterday to ensure that Abramovich could not profit from the holding in any way in the meantime. It will continue to operate under a restricted license where no new ticket sales (only season ticket holders that have already paid for tickets can attend), no merchandise sales and no player transfers or sales will be allowed. It will be worth watching to see what else might happen with Abramovich’s technology interests, and indeed how and if the government decides to pursue what are being described indirect investments. Abramovich has investment holdings outside of the U.K. too. In addition to Minden and Vollin — which each currently list Truphone as their only active investments on PitchBook — Abramovich is attached to two other VC firms, Norma based out of the British Virgin Islands and Impulse VC. Impulse is based in Moscow and has made some (some multiple rounds for the same startups, and some have exited). Norma has made , including battery startup StoreDot, OpenWeb (formerly Spot.IM) and BrainQ Technologies. Abramovich was as one of several Russian investors in Telegram’s ill-fated ICO several years ago. Although I’ve contacted Pavel Durov at Telegram to ask if he is an investor now, and have confirmed he is not. “No, luckily none of them are our investors 😌,” he told me in a Telegram message. Several investors, such as and , have released statements regarding to their relationship with Russia and Russian money in recent days. Those statements are careful to note that money is not “directly” from Russia or LPs of Russian origin. That raises the question of what role “indirect” might play. In the meantime they are pulling away from investing in Russian startups, and they are encouraging portfolio companies with Russian operations to wind those down, too. |
Makers Fund-backed virtual social app MEW woos comic fans in the US | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 3 | 11 | Raven Gao didn’t set up virtual social platform to ride the metaverse wave. He began working on MEW in mid-2019 with a Tencent veteran because he wanted to build a virtual safe haven for socially awkward introverts like himself. MEW’s interface can be perplexing for many people at first glance. The lingo and aesthetics of the app have a clear appeal to fans of the anime, comic and gaming (ACG) subculture, Gao remarked. Cute anime-style images and creamy colors embelish the app and command buttons use terms more familiar to ACG fans. Rather than “signup”, MEW calls it “create your traveling file.” Users interact through interest-based hubs dubbed “strongholds” managed by other users, a design similar to that of Discord. Even the app’s name MEW, which is short for “Members of the Excellent World,” exudes an air of camaraderie for fantasy lovers. The first iteration of MEW launched in mid-2020, and its reach today is still limited. Several tens of thousands of users are active daily, though they spend a long time — 100 minutes on average — dwelling in interest hubs oriented around the usual suspects like games, movies, anime, but also more universal topics like self-improvement and football. Silicon Valley’s Makers Fund took a leap of faith in Gao in early 2020 when most Chinese investors thought the founder was “out of his mind” trying to build a new social network at a time the industry was dominated by giants like Tencent. In 2021, when “metaverse” became all the rage in both the U.S. and China, Troph, the parent company of MEW, suddenly found itself being coveted by investors at home. Troph took on more funding from China’s 5Y Capital and Zoo Capital late last year, bringing its total capital raised to date to nearly $10 million. The company has not previously announced its funding amount. Screenshots of the MEW app The world today has no shortage of startups claiming to be building virtual worlds and metaverses. But some of these products are “simply an avartar-based social platform mimicking the real world” while others are just “games with some social property,” Gao argued. MEW, in contrast, wants people to live out their “alter ego” online with complete honesty and comfort. Gao believes he has the right partner to carry out this vision. His co-founder Qiang Li spent five years at Tencent’s QQ, the most popular social network in China’s PC era, where he led a front-end team building the messenger’s iPad version. Even today, QQ, with its many gamified features, remains largely popular among Chinese youngsters. MEW hasn’t started monetizing, but Gao hopes to derive new forms of monetization beyond the conventional types for social networks like advertising, subscriptions and donation, by involving its users and sharing potential income with them. “We want to explore a model in which the users who make contributions to our product can share the rewards,” said Gao. Blockchain naturally comes to mind as a potential incentive mechanism. But Gao said in the short run, the company won’t issue any coin offering or adopt blockchain. Troph’s goal this year is to expand to the U.S., capturing a similar game- and anime-loving demographic as it has in China. The company has around 30 staff in China now and is actively hiring in the U.S. |
Dyson is betting you’ll want to strap an air purifier to your face | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Air. I love it, you love it. We’re all out here walking around in it all day, filling our lungs and blood with the stuff. We can’t get enough of it. But that beautiful, wonderful, life-saving air that you, me and your pet chinchilla all need is bad sometimes. That’s right. The same air we rely on is sometimes filled with bad, tiny things. Things that would love nothing more than to fly into your nose and wreak havoc on your soft, unprotected insides. Over the past two years, air purifiers have seen a massive spike in sales here in the U.S., starting with a 57% increase in 2020. The pandemic, coupled with phenomenon like the California wildfires, has driven many to install filters in their homes and offices. All the while, the engineers at Dyson have been asking themselves one important question: What if we found a way to stick the purifier on people’s faces? In a world where mask wearing has become the status quo, maybe it’s not the most out-there question? Maybe. Dyson The Dyson Zone is a beast. It has many of the hallmarks of Dyson’s much-loved product design, with the decided (and not insignificant) difference that it’s designed to be strapped onto the wearer’s face. Or, more precisely, I suppose, strapped to a pair of headphones and worn in front of their mouth. Honestly, the basic form factor most closely resembles a football helmet. The final product arrives after 500 prototypes over six years, according to the company. Says Dyson: Originally a snorkel-like clean air mouthpiece paired with a backpack to hold the motor and inner workings, the Dyson Zone air-purifying headphones evolved dramatically over its six years in development. More than 500 prototypes saw one motor initially placed at the nape become two compressors, one in each ear-cup and the evolution of the snorkel mouthpiece into an effective, contact-free visor that delivers clean air without full-face contact – a brand-new clean air delivery mechanism. Dyson The removable visor shoots a pair of filtered air streams at the user’s mouth and nose without coming in direct contact with the face. It’s designed to filter out allergens, pollutants and other particulates. Dyson isn’t making any claims here about the Zone’s ability to filter out contagions like COVID. Instead, the product comes with an attachment that allows a user to wear a face covering in addition to the product. The headphones feature three noise-canceling modes, and the front piece has four air purification settings. Exact pricing and availability are not yet available — which is too bad, because I really want to know how much this thing is going to run. Broadly, it’s arriving in select markets at some point this fall. More information on all of that is promised in the coming months. |
The tech inside the new Lotus Eletre EV hints at autonomous driving ambitions | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Lotus unveiled Tuesday a battery-electric “hyper” SUV called the Eletre — the first of a trio of EVs Lotus plans to launch over the next four years. The upshot? The Eletre, which means “coming to life,” is the British brand’s first utility vehicle and a crucial play for the anticipated boom in demand for battery-electric luxury SUVs. The vehicle’s design and luxury interior features are notable. But it’s some of the vehicle’s tech, including a whopping four lidar sensors that pop out when needed, that provides the best glimpse of what Lotus has in store for the future. First the basics. The company, which is owned by Geely Automotive and Malaysian conglomerate Etika Automotive, is packing in the power, torque and some decent battery range. The Eletre has an 800-volt electric architecture, allowing for fast charging without battery degradation. There are two electric motors, one on each axle, that produce a minimum of 600 horsepower and allow the SUV to rocket from 0 to 60 mph in less than three seconds. Lotus says its battery pack, which will have more than 100-kilowatts of storage, will allow the Eletre to travel 373 miles on a full charge under the European WLTP cycle. A 350-kilowatt charger can add 248 miles in 20 minutes. The Eletre comes with four drive modes, including one for off road, which adjusts the steering, damper settings, powertrain and accelerator pedal response. The vehicle will go into production at Lotus’ new facility in Wuhan, China, later this year. Lotus As Lotus’ first SUV and EV, the new model “heralds a momentous point in our history and a clear signal of our ongoing desire to transform our business,” according to Lotus Cars managing director Matt Windle. The aim, of course, is for this momentous point in history to turn into momentous future profits. Lotus did not share pricing information for the Eletre, making it difficult to precisely pinpoint its competitors. Depending on its price, it may compete with Tesla Model X or some of the more upscale SUVs that register as top-sellers for luxury brands, from Lamborghini to Aston Martin. There’s a growing list of potential competitors. Maserati announced last week plans to launch two all-electric SUVs: a battery-powered version of its Levante midsize SUV and an all-new compact crossover called the Grecale. Ferrari’s first SUV, the $300,000 Purosangue, is expected later this year. Notably, Lotus has “future proofed” the Eletre with sensors and other hardware that can be activated via over-the-air software updates to improve or add features to its advanced driver assistance system. Lidar, the light detection and ranging sensor that is commonly viewed as the key to safely deploying autonomous vehicles, is starting to be adopted by automakers like Mercedes-Benz, Volvo and now, Lotus. These automakers see lidar as a necessary sensor to provide redundancy for specific and limited autonomous driving features, not full autonomy. At least not yet. Lotus This seems to be how Lotus intends to use lidar in the Eletre. Lotus plans to use four lidar sensors, which can be “deployed” or pop out when needed. Lotus said the lidar sensors are hidden when not required, “only emerging from the top of the windscreen, the top of the rear glass, and from the front wheel arches as required.” This lidar sensor system will eventually allow the vehicle to enter and exit parking spots via smartphone app. But comments from Maximilian Szwaj, vice president of Lotus Technology and managing director of the Lotus Tech Innovation Center in Germany, show the company is thinking beyond parking. “ADAS technologies such as LIDAR sensors and cameras will become increasingly common on new cars as we move into a more autonomous era,” he said in a statement, adding that the car has tech for today and also for tomorrow. The vehicle will also include a camera-based mirror system, which current U.S. regulations prohibit. The three different cameras are for the rear-view mirror, a second to create a 360-degree view of the car from above to aid parking and a third used for its advanced driver assistance system. Lotus said the cameras work in tandem with the lidar system to deliver “autonomous driving capability.” Lotus doesn’t provide more detail about what “autonomous driving capability” means beyond its aspirations for parking. But four lidar sensors and three cameras suggests the company’s aspirations extend to other limited or conditional autonomous driving features. Lotus Other innovations include what the company calls porosity, the principle of air flowing through the car as well as under, over and around it Now, the Eletre has it, which suggests that this design innovation is here to stay. Some of the more obvious examples of these air channels can be seen at the lower grille, front fenders and near the taillights. a network of interconnecting triangular petals that stay shut when the car is not moving or if there’s a need to reduce drag during driving. They open to feed air into the radiator, allowing the Eletre to “breathe” when cooling of the electric motors, battery pack and front brakes is required, according to Lotus. |
AR glasses maker Nreal nabs $200M funding in 12 months | Rita Liao | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | China’s augmented reality startup Nreal is on a roll. The company, which hopes to bring AR to the masses by making bright-color, lightweight smart glasses, has just received $60 million in a Series C extension round, bringing its total funding in the last 12 months to a handsome $200 million. The new investment is led by Alibaba, which has historically been a more hands-on but less active corporate investor than its . The Chinese e-commerce giant has a reputation for acquiring controlling stakes in startups that can potentially be a complementary piece to its giant retail ecosystem. Alibaba’s investment in Nreal, however, is purely financial. In theory, the two could have generated strategic synergies. One could easily imagine Alibaba hooking Nreal up with its gaming and video streaming units, or even having it develop smart glasses for its millions of food delivery riders — who recently began . But with the onset of China’s antitrust crackdown, the country’s tech behemoths have no doubt become more cautious with any investment that can be perceived as encouraging unfair competition. Plus, Nreal, which was , Despite being China-based, Nreal hasn’t targeted its home market but has instead first tested the consumer appetite in six overseas countries, including and the U.S. The smart glasses maker has relied on partnering with local carriers to tout its devices. In the U.S., for example, Verizon is helping to sell , which has a relatively affordable price tag of $600 and can be plugged into a 5G-compatible Android device. With the proceeds from its latest round, Nreal will finally make a foray into China this year. The funding will also be spent on R&D and growing its ecosystem of content and apps, which will be critical to user adoption. |
null | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 11 | null |
Everything you need to know about YC Winter 2022 Demo Day, part 1 | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | The TechCrunch team spent today covering the first day of Y Combinator’s Winter 2022 Demo Day, which featured half of the 394 companies that plan to virtually present. Since the overall batch is bigger than ever before – with 414 companies in total – we decided to divide, conquer and create a slew of YC Demo Day trend pieces for you to parse through the cohort. It’s not all inclusive – for a list at your own leisure – but instead we aimed to provide signal amid the noise, and shout out out some of our favorite companies within this season’s batch as well. Before you check out all of our coverage from Day 1, there are some broader statistics and notes about the cohort to note. The fully virtual cohort, YC’s 34th Demo Day to date, was the first group to receive The deal, announced in January, is a $500,000 investment across two checks for the same equity stake as before, 7%. Other firsts for the 2022 YC Demo Day batch include country representation from New Zealand, Sudan, Uganda and Costa Rica. Despite growing its check size, geography focus and the overall size of the batch, YC’s Demo Day mostly fell on diversity. About 10% of founders in this cohort identify as women, down from 12% the batch prior. About 6% of founders in this cohort identify as Black, slightly up from 4% from the year prior, and 12% identify as LatinX, down from 15% the year prior. Big thank you to our team – Mary Ann, Kate, Connie, Lucas, Devin, Alex, Alyssa, Amanda, Anna, Bryce, Greg, Henry and Tage – for the team work. Okay! Without any further ado, here’s what we got into today: The TechCrunch staff spends lots of time diving into the technologies that startups are building, the sectors they are focused on, and the parts of the world they hope to serve. As a result, each of us has a distinct perspective covering YC Demo Day. Out of the hundreds of companies we saw today, which stood out the most to TechCrunch staffers? More than 191 companies in India have been funded through YC accelerator with nearly half of those companies accepted in the last 12 months. This year’s batch of YC Demo Day companies plan to tackle a diverse range of challenges within tech, but appear concentrated mostly within the financial services sector. Think ‘buy now, pay later’ pitches, savings-focused neobanks and, of course, bitcoin bets. It’s a contrast from prior showings, in which most of India’s YC startups fell into the B2B services category. There are 35 fintech companies this year at YC Demo Day, just over double the amount of the 2021 winter batch and up from 18 in the summer program, according to the organization’s directory. We’ve listed each startup presented with thoughts about the broader problem each is trying to solve. What you’ll notice about this year’s cohort is the prevalence of companies from Nigeria, Indonesia and Argentina. The U.S. has the most representation at YC Demo Day W2022. India, with 32 startups, is the second-largest demographic represented in this new batch, while Nigeria is third, having delivered a total of 18 startups. This is the first time an African country is appearing in the top three. Africa as a whole has 24 startups in this new batch, a record besting S21’s 15. This was a massive year for crypto at YC Demo Day W2022 and Senior Editor Lucas Matney wanted to make sure that we profiled each and every crypto startup that publicly launched at Demo Days this batch. The list of 25 companies unsurprisingly spans NFTs, DeFi, web3 services and crypto investing. YC seems to be actively leaning into startups that are roughly the same age, operating in the same countries and targeting exactly the same opportunity with nearly identical business models. While similar types of companies within a class had grown inescapable as YC’s class sizes have ballooned, a kind of sameness is more apparent than ever with it latest batch of 400 startups. In fact, it’s beginning to look like the plan here is to back as many nascent rival teams as possible — then let them duke it out. We’ve rounded up some of the startups that seem to us to overlap within this YC Demo Day W22 batch. |
Our favorite startups from YC’s Winter 2022 Demo Day, part 1 | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Demo Day confab for the Winter 2022 batch is over. We shook up our coverage this year, divvying things up by sector and geography. Our goal was to avoid a huge list, the sort that we compiled in years past. TechCrunch has notes on the , , and . But one thing we’re not changing with our Y Combinator coverage is collecting favorites. Naturally, this is just our opinion. Our staff spends lots of time diving into the technologies that startups are building, the sectors they are focused on and the parts of the world they hope to serve. As a result, each of us has a distinct perspective. So, our favorites often stem from areas we know best and what we are currently fascinated by. Out of the hundreds of companies we saw today, which stood out the most to TechCrunch staffers? Read on! |
The 26 crypto startups that Y Combinator is backing in its W22 batch | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | at YC this batch. Y Combinator Demo Days returned yet again with another ballooning heap of startups. In the old days, a gaggle of TechCrunch reporters would go to the Demo Day in person, write up the presentations of each startup and hobnob with VCs during the breaks, but in a post-pandemic bloat, YC has gotten just so massive that one comprehensive list of startups is neither feasible nor particularly useful to readers. That said, this was a massive year for crypto and I wanted to make sure that we profiled each and every crypto startup that publicly launched at Demo Days this batch. The list of 26 companies unsurprisingly spans NFTs, DeFi, web3 services and crypto investing. These are listed in the seemingly random order in which they appeared on the YC Demo Days site. The “ ” sections are also taken from that site, while the “ ” section is largely based on info from the LinkedIn profiles of the co-founders of each startup. I have not personally fact-checked any of the information that was self-reported by the founders themselves. The “ ” section is made up entirely of my own insightful thoughts, though I also cannot guarantee that they are always all that insightful. Now, onto the startups… But wait! While I have you, please do me a favor and subscribe to TechCrunch’s new crypto-focused and Chain Reaction which is launching in April — hosted by myself and my colleague Anita Ramaswamy. Okay, , onto the startups!! : “SimpleHash allows web3 developers to query all NFT data from a single API. We index multiple blockchains, take care of edge cases, provide a rapid media CDN, and can be integrated in a few lines of code.”
: Alex Kilkka previously co-founded NFT social network Showtime and Olly Wilson has been an EIR at Portage Ventures.
The NFT market has made huge strides already on Ethereum, but it’s no secret that any future mainstream embrace of NFTs will rely on Layer 2 blockchains lowering transaction costs. Where this creates opportunities for startups, it also introduces cross-chain headaches for them, something SimpleHash is looking to streamline. : “NFTScoring is the place for you to discover, analyze and trade NFTs. We give you the superpowers to understand the NFT market in any given moment, make the best decisions, and take faster actions.”
: David Mokoš and Adam Zvada previously co-founded AI lab Cognitic and hyperlocal delivery platform GoDeliver together.
NFTScoring is trying to build a better dashboard for NFT traders which accounts for some of the unique attributes that make some NFTs more valuable than others, all while helping users find trending projects early. A big emphasis appears to be tracking which projects NFT whales are buying into through tracking a network of wallets. The startup has premium tier pricing which users need to pay for with Eth. : “Launching an NFT collection can seem tantalizing for brands, however, when executed poorly can create long-lasting negative implications. We take the cringe out of NFTs.”
: Brant Choate and Dan Conger both previously worked in senior roles at enterprise messaging startup Podium.
Basically as soon as NFTs took off, brands looked how to get involved and saw a pretty confusing space with a lot of consumer skepticism tied up in it. Soon after, a lot of white-label NFT services took off aiming to give them a better path towards launching NFT projects. Remi Labs is eyeing this opportunity with a specific focus on NFT collections early-on. : “We are building Slack for Web3. We aim to replace LLCs with DAOs in emerging market cross border collaborations. We will take costly multi-step months-long company registration and setups down to $50 a month and with the ease of opening a Slack channel.”
: Van Tran previously led strategy in the SEA region for Netflix, Geoffrey See was an exec at identity startup Trusting Social and Sean Ang founded education org Success Alliance Enrichment.
DAOs are hot, but the tooling behind them is still catching up with the hype. Poko is leaning into the idea of using DAOs as LLCs which has some legal blurriness stateside but less so in plenty of other geographies including Singapore (as far as I know) where the startup is based. : “GoSats is a bitcoin rewards app. We help people accumulate free bitcoin as cashbacks and rewards every time they shop in India.”
: Roshni Aslam was previously a research analyst at consulting firm ONEX AE, Mohammed Roshan was the CTO for blockchain startup ThroughBit.
Crypto credit card rewards are a pretty well-worn path at this point. Though India’s government has played hardball with crypto thus far, plenty of entrepreneurs see the market as one where the industry has outsized opportunities. : “Cashmere is a crypto wallet for web3 startups to manage their digital assets on Solana. Instead of running their business from one person’s wallet, startups can use our wallet to collaboratively manage their funds.”
: Shashank Khanna previously was a senior engineer at SoFi, Rebecca Lee was a deployed engineer at Retool and Charlotte McGinn was a software engineer at Tesla.
Consumer crypto wallets have been big business over the past year, but the tech to help startups, projects and DAOs manage funds securely with enterprise-grade multi-signature wallets has had less action. Solana has courted plenty of developer attention over the past year and they are. aiming to replicate some of Ethereum’s tooling while leveraging Solana’s advantages to make improvements. : “Chaingrep is a search engine for on-chain interactions and digital assets. You can think of it as a new kind of block explorer. We think that current block explorers like Etherscan are too complicated to use for regular users, and that abstracting a lot of their functionalities and filtering out all the noise can dramatically improve the experience of finding on-chain information.”
: Rosco Kalis previously was an engineer at crypto startup Truffle, Merwane Drai has no LinkedIn profile but says he’s working on hacking his way out of the matrix.
The transparency offered my blockchains is only as good as the platforms that make interpreting that data simple and readable, something that will become more important as more non-technical users find their way to web3 platforms. Winter : “Winter offers an embeddable widget to help your consumers buy an NFT with a credit card or bank account! We also help custody & manage a user’s NFT if they don’t have a wallet.”
: Michael Luo was previously a product manager at Facebook, Laila Chima was a software engineer at Stripe.
For anyone who has navigated the process of buying an NFT, the headaches associated with buying crypto on a centralized exchange, creating a wallet and transferring the crypto to that wallet to make a purchase are often the most time-consuming parts of the process. It’s unsurprising that startups are trying to abstract this away with credit card purchases, which will likely appeal to web2 platforms that are trying to find an opportunity in NFTs. : “Decent enables musicians to monetize their work directly through their fans, aligning artist & fan incentives to reinvent funding, IP protection, and discovery. We do this through a marketplace and infrastructure that enables musicians to issue NFTs collateralized by their royalties.”
: Will Collier was previously an analyst at Accenture, Charlie Durbin was an analyst at Vox Media, Will Kantaros is studying Applied Math and Econ at Brown, Alexander Carlson is a music producer.
NFTs have largely found their fit in the art world, but a handful of startups have been trying to find opportunities in other facets of media like music. Decent’s sell seems to be creating NFT incentive structures for new fans to build up buzz around musicians over time that’s more closely tied to the success of the songs themselves. : “Yatima is a Substrate blockchain which uses on-chain formal verification and zero-knowledge proofs to radically improve the safety and scalability of smart contracts, and other deterministic computations.”
: John Burnham was previously CEO of Sunshine Cybernetics, Samuel Burnham recently graduated with a CS degree from CypherD : “Existing Crypto Wallets are too geeky for mainstream users. We are building a multi-chain crypto wallet simplifying user experience for the mainstream users along with a crypto card.”
: Kuberan Marimuthu was previously a senior engineering manager at Coinbase, Muthukrishnan Ramabadran was a senior software engineer at Lyft, Dheeban S.G. was a senior engineer at blockchain startup Magic.
: “Courtyard stores physical collectibles (trading cards, sneakers, watches, etc.) in secured vaults, creates a 3D representation of the asset and mints it as an NFT on the blockchain. We’ve partnered with one of the largest security companies in the world to store collectibles.”
: : “We build the tools and infrastructure that make it easier, faster and cheaper for anyone in Africa easy, fast and cheap access to crypto and web3.”
: Crypto advocates are quick to highlight how blockchain-based payments can do wonders for unbanked users in developing countries, but precious little venture funding seems to have been given to teams aiming to do just that. : “Argo is on a mission to empower Film and TV makers worldwide. It’s the easiest way to upload and monetize your content. Argo provides the technology and the ecosystem for the Filmmakers to monetize their film and tv work through advertising, subscription and NFT sales.”
: Argo seems to be a media startup focused on short films first and foremost, offering a platform for filmmakers to showcase their work while also tapping NFT sales as a way of helping them monetize their work and build buzz. : “Finnt is the first DeFi app for families. We provide multi-user, high yield saving accounts, which make it easy to save with crypto for your children or family members.”
: DeFi for families is an awfully specific pitch, which seems mainly focused on allowing users to link sub-accounts to a central investment account. High-profile exploits of DeFi protocols are undoubtedly going to leave some families skeptical of putting their nest egg here, but much higher yield rates are likely going to make it a risk some are happy to take. Tradezi : “Tradezi is the Robinhood for Southeast Asia. We aim to help everyone invest in stocks, crypto, and other alternative assets all in one place.”
: Robinhood has obviously done a lot to expose American retail traders to crypto by showcasing the coins alongside publicly traded stocks, this is a model Tradezi seems to be interested in tackling in SEA. : “Botin a mobile app where people in Latin America can invest in US Stocks, Crypto and more.”
: Robert Baron was previously a developer at BitGo, James Jara was previously a software engineer at Avantica. The Costa Rica startup is also taking the Robinhood approach towards stock and crypto to Latin American users and hoping to find a broader audience for retail trading. : “earnJARVIS is a crypto investment platform that helps retail investors (i.e, you) and businesses intelligently invest across the crypto-economy.”
: Atyab Bhatti was previously a manager at McKinsey, Kush Maheshwari was previously a software engineer at Rubrik. Robo-advisors have been big business for entry retail investors, but crypto trading has largely been a DIY affair at the same levels. There’s likely going to be a crop of platforms popping up that promise to automate the process of diversifying across crypto assets while exposing users to elements of the DeFi world. : “We’re bring universally needed tools to crypto companies to help them manage their token distributions, tokenholder onboarding/offboarding, and other critical tools.”
: Bruno Faviero previously was a product manager at Palantir, Arun Kirubarajan is a graduate researcher at Penn. Cap tables have gotten hilariously convoluted in an era where crypto startups are granting both equity and tokens to investors and employees. The cleverly named Magna is looking to add some much-needed streamlining to managing token grants in the same way Carta rethought cap table management for web2 startups. : “With Soon you can invest without the stress of speculating. Our fully automated sweep account attaches to your bank and uses routine spending activity to signal market trades. By investing on a schedule and selling available gains when you spend, Soon automates investing from beginning to end.”
: Chris Lovato was previously a DevOps engineer at Adobe, Aaron Bylund led corporate strategy at Nu Skin, Michael Shattuck was previously a senior software engineer at Pluralsight. Just because new platforms are bringing users access to new asset classes doesn’t mean consumers all want to turn into part-time investors. Soon is building a platform that automatically invests idle money in a user’s bank account across crypto and more traditional assets. : “LiquiFi (“Carta for crypto”) helps companies and DAOs automate their token vesting, management, and distribution to employees, investors, partners, and community members. Secure, audited smart contracts guarantee timely distribution of vesting tokens and save significant time and resources spent building your own solution.”
: Robin Ji previously was a product lead at Eco, Oliver Tang was an engineering manager at Amazon. It’s unsurprising that YC is backing a pair of startups approaching the same opportunity, token management is a clear web3 startup growing pain and YC has always been particularly successful in helping scale “startup-for-startup” products. : “A single API for fintechs to embed DeFi products on their platform. This allows them to acquire more customers, retain these customers and increase revenue & engagement, all in a custodial, secure, & compliant way.”
: Pranay Shetty was an early employee at CloudKitchens, Ramkumar Venkataraman was the founding engineer of Moneyworld. While trading stocks and crypto inside the same app has grown to be an expected feature of traditional trading apps, that same relationship hasn’t come to DeFi and traditional fintech services which live separate lives in separate apps and platforms. : “OnScale is business bank for high-earning Creators that automates income budgeting, cash flow management, tax write offs and invoicing. We help creators automate financial tasks, save money and time.”
: Tonjé Bakang Tonje is the founder of Afrostream, German Saprykin was a senior engineering manager at Grab. While plenty of creator-focused web3 products have taken particular aim at NFT creators, OnScale is looking to help a broader swath of creators access traditional financial products while building in crypto rails to help users easily convert income into crypto inside the platform. : “We make crypto investing safe and easy for consumer and businesses through DeFi yielding. Our product is plain simple. People can deposit and withdraw in 3 clicks. Right after deposit, they might earn competitive interest with no hidden fees. The interest is obtained from DeFi protocols.”
: Fransiskus Raymond was a sales manager at Gojek, Ghuniyu Fattah Rozaq was a developer at Ritase. An awful lot has been said about DeFi yield farming which offers high percentage rates for depositing funds into investment pools. Sometimes these seemingly too-good-to-be-true rates have proven to be just that, but other times they highlight how much upside there is when users cut banks (and their associated protections) from the investing/saving process. Bloom : “Bloom offers students and young professionals in East Africa US Dollar banking. By saving in USD or digital dollars, and spending as they go in local currencies, they won’t be subject to inflation.”
: Ahmed Ismail previously worked at Barclays, Khalid Keenan was an engineer at Finbourne, Youcef Oudjidane was a managing partner at Class 5 Global, Abdigani Diriye was a research manager at Amazon. The Sudan startup is looking to tap stablecoins to help young professionals in East Africa avoid the hyperinflation common to many currencies in the region. There are clearly large opportunities in helping users in developing nations build wealth, but the risks associated with crypto means that these startups have a big burden of responsibility as well. : “Every Web3 community is unique, yet every discord looks the same. We help Web3 communities bring unique and engaging experiences, typically reserved for websites, right into the discussion.”
: Samraaj Bath previously founded Chaa club, Kartik Sathappan has been angel investing at 25kchecks. Discord sits at the center of the web3 universe, but isn’t a web3 startup. They’ve flirted with deeper NFT-based functionality but it’s grown clear that their broader user base doesn’t want their gaming chat app turning into a web3 chat app, something that has left many to wonder whether there’s a more native solution out there. Take a look at some more of our Y Combinator Demo Day coverage. |
Daily Crunch: Child-friendly Amazon Glow video chat projector now available across the US | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Tuesday, March 29, 2022! and I are now flying solo with the newsletter. It will be all hands on deck today and tomorrow as we listen to startups pitch at the YC Demo Day, so look out for a deluge of stories over the next two days. Don’t forget to join us Wednesday for the online event, and then at on April 14. A very warm welcome to , who is joining our crypto desk and comes careening out of the starting blocks with . Great story and welcome aboard! – It’s the most wonderful tiiiime of the yeaaaaaar – Y Combinator , but its Demo Day comprises 424 startups from 42 countries – so as you might imagine, it’s still a pretty intense time at TechCrunch Towers. YC’s Demo Day (the accelerator has funded almost 200 Indian startups to date), with heavy focus on fintech. Africa was represented as well, with . And some great news if you’re a mere millionaire, rather than part of the exclusive club: . Other goings-on across the startup ecosystem: / Getty Images Demo days are a showcase for tech media, but does this performative Silicon Valley tradition still benefit founders and investors? In a guest post for TC+, 22 Ventures co-founder and chair Michael Redd shares two factors that make demo days less relevant: Many startups sign funding deals before the big show, and founders are more interested in working with value-add investors. “Simply getting rid of demo day won’t help founders find, or let investors offer, that value,” Redd writes. “What we need is to better understand why demo day falls short and how to source deals on a much more intimate level.” |
Twitter ‘Collabs’ feature could make it possible for users to co-author tweets with brands | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | You can , but what about on Twitter? The social network is continuing to work on a feature that would allow multiple users to co-author a tweet, which it’s referring to as “Collaborations.” The option has yet to be made publicly available and only works after one user accepts a request to collaborate from another. It also seemingly hints at a possible plan to give creators a way to partner with businesses on brand ad deals — something that’s already common on rival social networks like YouTube, Instagram, TikTok and others. Twitter’s “Collaborations” feature was first dug up from the app’s code by mobile developer who, back in , shared references he found that indicated Twitter was working on a way for two people to become co-authors on a single tweet. In this scenario, both people’s Twitter handles and names would appear at the top of the tweet above its content. Earlier this year, Paluzzi a collaborations button had been added to the tweet composer screen and he discovered how the co-authors’ profile pictures would appear — one overlaid on top of the other — when their tweeted-out “Collab” showed up in the Twitter Timeline. continues to work on the Collabs feature 👀 Here's how the avatar will look like 👇🏻 — Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) Today Paluzzi has of the feature’s development when he tweeted out a screenshot that explains how Twitter Collaborations would work. Here, Twitter explains users would first ask a person or brand to “co-own” a tweet with them and wait for them to accept the request. In other words, you can’t force someone into a collaboration — it’s not just a way to tag someone on a tweet, that is. When the other user accepts the request, both accounts are shown as co-authors on the tweet, Twitter explains in this introductory screen. continues to work on the Collabs feature 👀 Let's see how it works 👇🏻 — Alessandro Paluzzi (@alex193a) Paluzzi told TechCrunch he hasn’t found anything in the code that would limit this feature’s availability only to select users — like creators using Twitter’s Super Follows, for instance. Still, this Collaborations addition is another indication that Twitter is thinking about how its platform could be leveraged in different ways beyond being a virtual town square or real-time news network. Among the many new products Twitter has been testing in recent months is the idea to turn Twitter into a creator platform, where followers could optionally subscribe to favorite accounts in exchange for exclusive access to fans-only content, like photos, video or other media or even private tweets. This , as it’s called, late last year and is now accessible by both iOS and Android users during this early test period. Eligibility state the creator has to be U.S.-based with at least 10,000 followers in order to offer a Super Follow subscription to their fans. Whether creators view Twitter as a viable platform to generate revenue from subscriptions still remains to be seen. But Twitter has a number of brand advertisers using its platform as well as high-profile users with large following counts that could be seen as Twitter “influencers” of sorts. Potentially, it could combine those two groups with this new Collaborations feature. Of course, a Collaborations feature could have a number of other use cases besides brand deals. It could be used to put out combined statements from organizations, businesses or people; to promote work with multiple authors or creators, like podcasts, newsletters or news articles. And it could be used for fun by people who wanted to team up for any other reason, too. Twitter, however, is leaving us to speculate about its plans for Twitter Collaborations for the time being. Reached for comment, a Twitter spokesperson would only confirm that the feature was something Twitter was currently “exploring,” but declined to share more about the feature, its plans or a future launch date. |
TechCrunch+ roundup: Plaid’s staffing story, RevOps for B2B sales, demo day’s demise | Walter Thompson | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | There’s no textbook-approved technique for building a startup engineering team: in the early days, everyone wears several hats. But when a company enters its growth phase, the recruiting process is systematized, new hires are sorted into discrete units, and a thin layer of management is applied to keep everything on track. When Jean-Denis Greze accepted the CTO role at Plaid in 2017, the fintech company was still financing its Series A had “about 20 engineers who were still trying to feel their way to product-market fit,” . Today, Plaid’s engineering team numbers 350 people. In an interview, Greze explained how Plaid moved away from an all-hands-on-deck ethos to a system where contributors had clearly defined roles they weren’t locked into. I asked Ron what surprised him the most while reporting this story, and he said it was the fact that Visa’s failed attempt to purchase Plaid last year made it easier for them to hire new technical talent. Suddenly, “people who didn’t want to be part of a startup and wanted to solve bigger problems around scale and security were willing to talk to them,” says Ron. “Whereas before, they felt Plaid was a little too small for their ambitions.” Today and tomorrow, we’ll have team coverage of , including a selection of staff favorites, so be sure to check the site each afternoon. Thanks very much for reading TechCrunch+ this week! Walter Thompson
Senior Editor, TechCrunch+
/ Getty Images Demo days are a showcase for tech media, but does this performative Silicon Valley tradition still benefit founders and investors? In a guest post for TC+, 22 Ventures co-founder and chair Michael Redd shares two factors that make demo days less relevant: many startups sign funding deals before the big show, and founders are more interested in working with value-add investors. “Simply getting rid of demo day won’t help founders find, or let investors offer, that value,” Reed writes. “What we need is to better understand why demo day falls short and how to source deals on a much more intimate level.” / Getty Images The Ethereum community is bracing for a sea change. A long-anticipated decision to move from a proof-of-work consensus protocol to one that favors proof of stake will force many to mine other cryptocurrencies, writes Warren Rogers, CFO at Blockware Solutions. “Ethereum miners have a very high risk that their machines become obsolete overnight,” as PoS requires specialized hardware, which could leave Bitcoin as the major cryptocurrency of choice. “While it is possible that this could be true in the short term, in the long run, this transition sets the precedent for being able to materially change the underlying protocol,” says Rogers. / Getty Images Employees are hired to do one specific job, which is why even early-stage startups can become siloed. Companies that find ways to integrate their sales flow and customer success operations have an advantage, writes Erol Toker, founder and CEO of Truly.co. “Optimizing your unique path to better connect with customers requires having a cross-discipline team that’s focused solely on that objective and sees the client as their guiding star,” Toker says. “We call that RevOps.” / Getty Images It’s easy to build a recommendation algorithm for a business that sells jackets online, but when selling NFTs, optimizing for limitless inventory, anonymous customers, and opaque consumer behavior becomes magnitudes harder. These may be just growing pains for NFT marketplaces, but the current state of play harms digital creators, as their art becomes another drop in the ocean, writes Alexandre Robicquet, co-founder and CEO of Crossing Minds. The key to solving this problem, says Robicquet, is to build a system that promotes discovery of NFTs: “If a recommendation algorithm can ensure that buyers can meaningfully discover NFTs they love, or think there’s investment potential in, or both, and if it can keep buyers coming back for more, then artists will reap the benefits for years down the line.” / Getty Images Data centers consume approximately one percent of the world’s electricity each year, but considering the fact a recent heat wave in Antarctica just cost us another ice shelf, every little bit counts. In an in-depth post, Cloudbolt CEO Jeff Kukowski shares multiple strategies that reduce IT energy consumption by employing intelligent automation, increasing visibility, reducing shadow IT, and optimizing CI/CD pipelines. “The sum of many small changes will lead to the transformative improvements that must be made,” he says. |
Motorola still has fight left as it nabs No. 3 spot in the US market | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Turns out the smartphone market can still surprise — to an extent. You can almost certainly figure out which two companies command the first and second position in the U.S. market these days. You would, however, be forgiven for doing a double-take after hearing that Motorola has managed to shore up third place, according to new figures from Counterpoint Research. It hasn’t been a particularly smooth decade or two for the brand. A dominant name after the turn of the millennium, things have been rocky for the firm in this post-iPhone world. After some massive losses, Motorola split in two, selling off its Mobility wing to Google in 2011. Google’s record with hardware being what it is, the phone company switched hands again three years later. Lenovo has been a far more stable home for the erstwhile brand. Its successes can, in part, be attributed to its decision to largely eschew the high-end of the market dominated by the aforementioned brands. Brazil and India, in particular, have become key markets for the company. The U.S., too has remained a stronghold — and a thinning out of the herd in the mid- and budget tiers created a vacuum that the company has been more than happy to fill. According to Counterpoint’s figures, Motorola saw a staggering 131% year over year growth in 2021. That makes the firm the number two in smartphones below $400 in the U.S. and number three overall. In particular, its sub-$300 phones have gained traction, with Moto nabbing around 10% of the total market. Counterpoint Research It’s not quite a return to its 2008 dominance, but it’s the company’s best showing since the smartphones came to dominate the phone market. Pre-paid providers like Metro, Cricket and Boost have been a big piece — it now controls around 28% of that market. Most important, however, are the names that aren’t on the list here. It’s been a weird few years for the industry, and Lenovo was clearly well positioned to pounce. Following its addition to the U.S. entity list, Huawei is effectively a non-factor. After selling off a huge chunk of its R&D to Google (them again?), HTC has largely gone quietly into that good night, choosing instead to focus on VR (the jury’s still out on that move). But the biggest no-show is LG. Last April, the South Korean hardware firm exited the smartphone market entirely. “Moving forward, LG will continue to leverage its mobile expertise and develop mobility-related technologies such as 6G to help further strengthen competitiveness in other business areas. Core technologies developed during the two decades of LG’s mobile business operations will also be retained and applied to existing and future products,” the company said at the time. The move appears to have opened a perfectly Motorola-shaped hole in the market. The smartphone maker’s successes have also been bolstered by its position as a legacy brand. That is to say, while it may have faded from consciousness a bit, there’s still enough goodwill from its glory days to expedite buying decisions. If you’ve got a tight budget and find yourself shopping for a $300 phone at, say, Walmart, chances are good you’re going to gravitate toward a name you recognize — even if it’s from the Razr glory days of a couple of decades ago. And you know what? You wouldn’t be wrong. The company continues to have a good track record of making solid budget phones. So, yeah, call it a comeback. I certainly won’t stop you. |
Starry’s SPAC part of Chet Kanojia’s mission to shake up broadband | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Eight years after starting to change the way the home internet is delivered, CEO Chaitanya “Chet” Kanojia announced this week that the company completed its special purpose acquisition with FirstMark Horizon Acquisition Corp. and is now trading on the New York Stock Exchange. The Boston-based internet service provider’s approach involves beaming broadband-speed internet through the air using millimeter waves. Starry’s novel technology beams the internet to your home, but because naturally most people live near others, the company deploys “ ” that essentially group multiple antennas together so it can beam the internet to a bunch of places at the same time. It touts its internet plan, which runs at about $50 a month, as one that doesn’t involve a long-term contract or hidden fees, a free WiFi router and unlimited data. You can read more about Starry’s origins in a . Though there has been some speculation about the and if it could work, given its ability to beam long distances and what might happen in inclement weather, Starry’s unique technique attracted a lot of investor attention from the likes of FirstMark, Tiger Global Management and KKR, ultimately raising $400 million before going public, Kanojia told TechCrunch. He explained that in going public, Starry was “looking for a long-term partnership that was going to be supportive,” and it found that in FirstMark. Kanojia leads the new entity, and the transaction gives Starry a pro forma enterprise value of $1.76 billion, with gross proceeds of $176 million, according to the company. “There are few firms you see going into a seed-stage company and nursing it to IPO,” Kanojia added. “We really wanted someone who had seen that movie because the long-term nature of partnerships is critical in public markets. This relationship already spans 20 years for a lot of us.” If you are asking yourself why Kanojia’s name is familiar, that’s because he had previously founded the — which FirstMark also invested in — to pull content from free over-the-air signals, essentially with a goal of disrupting the way we watch television. When TV broadcasters didn’t like that, , where ultimately Aereo’s business was . Kanojia has since shaken that off, saying that “the court’s history is littered with unfortunate decisions, and we were one of them.” Despite that, Aereo had a product that was well received by customers and a business model that grew rapidly, he says. What he took away from the experience was that there was “pent-up demand for serving customers in the way they think is fair.” So when he started Starry, he wanted to provide a customer-focused experience that would add value for customers versus competitors that he says are company-focused and instead extract value from customers. Meanwhile, the closing of the SPAC deals seems to be a happy beginning for Kanojia. Today, Starry has both a loyal customer base and one that is also rapidly growing, Kanojia said. “Going public was a capital event for us, not a liquidity event, so we are not going to screw around with the recipe, but get on a regular capital cycle,” he added. “The company is on a great trajectory for growth and the unit economics are fantastic.” |
Messenger adds new shortcuts, including a Slack-like ‘@everyone’ feature | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Meta, formerly known as Facebook, is introducing several new to its Messenger app. Most notably, the company is adding a new Slack-like “@everyone” functionality that will notify all participants in a chat about a new message. Meta notes that the new feature is perfect for group reminders, get-togethers or when you’re asking a time-sensitive question and need a quick response. On the other hand, the company is also rolling out a “/silent” functionality. When you type in “/silent” before sending a message in a group chat, the members of the group will not receive a notification of your message at all. Meta says the feature removes the anxiety of interrupting someone who may be in a different time zone and allows users to read messages at their leisure. These two new features are available starting today. Meta also hinted at a few upcoming shortcuts that will roll out in the coming weeks. The company plans to launch a new “/pay” shortcut in the United States that will make it easier to send and receive money in one-on-one Messenger chats. The shortcut will roll out to both iOS and Android users. Meta is also going to introduce a “/gif” shortcut that will allow users to quickly find and send GIFs. This feature will be coming to iOS users only. iOS users will also get access to “/shrug” and “/tableflip” shortcuts, which will automatically type out the ¯_(ツ)_/¯ and (╯°□°）╯︵ ┻━┻ emoticons, respectively. Meta The launch of the new features comes as Messenger recently rolled out its “Split Payments” feature to all iOS and Android users in the United States. The company began testing the feature late last year as a way for users to share the cost of bills and expenses through the app. Meta sees the new feature as a “free and fast” way to handle finances through Messenger. Split Payments was introduced alongside the news that Messenger was launching new voice message recording controls so users can pause, preview, delete or continue recording a voice message before sending it. The company also increased the duration of voice messages from one minute to 30 minutes. |
How to make a teaser trailer for your startup pitch | Andrew Gershfeld | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | , nearly everything moved online, and investment pitches were among the first to do so. The entire milieu around startup funding shifted overnight. For many companies doing their business online, the move to online wasn’t a shock. However, a majority of VC firms only used an offline approach. It’s impossible for founders to “read the room” when pitching online, which puts them at a severe disadvantage. Research by UCL School of Management professor Chia-Jung Tsay found that which entrepreneurs would get funded based solely on founders’ physical cues like body language, facial expressions and stage presence. In essence, this new pitching model presents a new problem for founders: It’s critical to keep investors’ attention, but it’s also more challenging than ever before. This is where the “teaser trailer” can work in a startup’s favor. At Flint Capital, we listen to around 1,500 online pitches per year. After hearing 15,000 pitches in 10 years, I have some perspective on how to effectively create and leverage teasers that founders may find valuable when they are pitching online. It primes your contact for the big presentation. Every good pitch starts before the pitch. It’s always preferable to have a trusted contact, such as another investor or portfolio company founder, who can recommend you to the investors before you meet them. In my experience, about 85% of closed deals result from a pitch from a recommended founder. This means that a first introduction should involve the founder giving their contact this teaser to whet the investors’ appetites. You can think of this as an extension of your “elevator pitch.” Since we’re not getting the same in-person meeting opportunities, this is how founders can hook investors’ attention. In most cases, investors will ask you for an overview of your idea before the first online pitch call happens. Putting together a teaser trailer ahead of time gives you the chance to shine in your first impression to VCs. Add things that pique investors’ interest and make them wonder how you can make this idea work. Leave them thinking things like, “This is an unusual number. I wonder how they came to this conclusion?” Be careful not to over-dramatize, though, because this can be off-putting. Remember the adage of sales: “You have 30 seconds to buy three minutes.” |
Vietnam’s VinFast to invest $2B in North Carolina EV factory | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | VinFast, the Vietnamese automaker under Vingroup, said Tuesday it will build its first U.S. factory in North Carolina, part of the company’s previously stated plans to invest and expand in the country. The automotive newcomer said it will spend about $2 billion in the first phase of construction of the 1,976-acre North Carolina factory and will continue to invest in future phases. That first phase, which is expected to be completed by July 2024, will have the capacity to produce 150,000 vehicles annually. VinFast plans to produce two passenger vehicles at the factory as well as electric buses, batteries for electric vehicles and ancillary industries for suppliers. The VinFast VF 9, a 7-passenger all-electric SUV, and the VinFast VF 8, a 5-passenger, all-electric midsize SUV that will include and confirm ownership, will be produced at the U.S. factory, according to VinFast’s memorandum of understanding with North Carolina. Prices for the VF 9 and the VF 8 start at $56,000 and $41,000 in the U.S., respectively, the company shared at CES in January. VinFast has had a fast and furious ride since it launched in 2017. The company At the LA Auto Show last November, that the company said it would bring to the U.S. market later this year. At the time, the company also announced plans to invest more than $200 million to open a U.S. headquarters based in Los Angeles, as well as more than 60 sales locations, multiple service centers and mobile service sites this year. “Having a production facility right in the market will help VinFast to proactively manage its supply chain, maintain stabilized prices and shorten product supply time, making VinFast’s EVs more accessible to customers, contributing to the realization of local environmental improvement goals,” Le Thi Thu Thuy, Vingroup vice chair and VinFast global CEO, said in a statement. VinFast, which started selling EVs in Vietnam at the end of 2021, is targeting global EV sales of 42,000 vehicles this year. Vingroup recently started construction on a battery plant in Ha Tinh, Vietnam that’s expected to begin running later this year with a capacity of 5 gigawatt hours per year. The company is also shopping for a plant in Germany, . |
This startup’s novel tech promises to boost battery capacity for EVs | Kirsten Korosec | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Five years ago, Jonathan Tan and Roger Basu were on the hunt to find an industry where they could take their expertise in thin-film technology and make the biggest and fastest impact possible. They chose batteries — or more specifically, battery degradation and lifespan. It wasn’t — and still isn’t — an industry lacking in investment, research or companies claiming to have struck battery breakthrough gold. But the pair contend they have zagged where everyone else has zigged. Tan and Basu, who co-founded California-based startup Coreshell in 2017, said they steered clear of trying to develop a new battery from scratch, an expensive and lengthy undertaking that numerous companies were already working on. Instead, they focused their efforts on nanolayer coating technology that can be added to a battery cell manufacturer’s existing production system. This coating increases usable battery capacity by 30% or more and increases heat tolerance by 200%, all while lowering costs and improving safety, according to the Coreshell founders. It can also be applied to batteries with different chemistries and applications, including consumer electronics and electric vehicles. “We want to be the ‘Intel Inside’ of batteries,” Coreshell CEO Tan told TechCrunch. “We want to apply this coating technology directly on the most challenging surfaces inside the battery, which is the surface of the anode and the surface of the cathode, where it meets the electrolyte.” Coreshell has found support for its novel approach from several investors, battery manufacturers and even iconic dune buggy company Meyers Manx. Its quiver of advisers has also been loaded up with experts, including Tesla co-founder Marc Tarpenning; Chunmei Ban, a professor at the University of Colorado known for her work at the National Renewable Energy Laboratory; and Judith O’Brien, who has made a career out of helping companies IPO. The pair initially bootstrapped the company, then went through the in 2020 and raised some seed money. Coreshell also went through the program in February 2020. Since then, Coreshell has begun a collaboration with BASF to work on several different coatings for advanced cathode materials, as well as demonstrations with other battery cell manufacturers that Tan could not name. The company also recently raised $12 million in a Series A round led by Trousdale Ventures, Industry Ventures and Helios Capital Ventures. Existing investors Entrada Ventures, Foothill Ventures and Asymmetry Ventures also participated in the round. Coreshell has raised $19 million to date. Coreshell’s relationship with Trousdale Ventures and, more specifically, managing partner Phillip Sarofim also led to a partnership with Meyers Manx. A prototype Meyers Manx electric beach buggy will be the first vehicle to have the Coreshell technology “inside.” Sarofim, who is also chairman of Meyers Manx, said the partnership fits into the Meyers Manx mission to “continue bringing adventure and fun to the world, but with even more performance capabilities to match the expectations of modern-day consumers.” The Meyers Manx demonstration, plus collaborations with other battery cell manufacturers and automakers, allows Coreshell to show off the full capabilities both at the cell level and at the device level, as well as the speed at which it can be applied to vehicles, said Tan, a chemical engineer turned technical business development executive. The company is also working with New Era Converting Machinery to demonstrate how its thin-film coating technology can be used in roll-to-roll processing. If successful, Coreshell could convince automakers and cell manufacturers to adopt its technology. Battery producers use a continuous process called roll to roll. Cut open a cylindrical cell and you’ll see what looks like a jelly roll of electrodes, Tan explained. Before they’re put into the battery shell, these are essentially large rolls of electrodes on foil. “Obviously, it’s much smaller to start off with, but even just showing off that capability is a key step toward being able to show that, ‘Hey, you can slot us right in and get the performance enhancements of solving battery degradation and having increased capacity, while lowering manufacturing costs,'” Tan said. It’s this progress that caught Tarpenning’s attention. “It seemed like every six months there was some breakthrough announced that was gonna have some big step in battery capacity or price reduction or whatever the metric is — and that just never happens,” Tarpenning said. “Part of it is that a lot of these techniques that work in the lab don’t scale very well, or at all, or they require an enormous change in the process.” Coreshell appealed to him because it can be added to a cell manufacturer’s existing operation. “You can actually slot it in and see see how it scales in an existing factory — and that to me was huge,” he said. “I was like, wow, OK, that that’s one of those big sort of chicken-and-egg things that just got solved.” |
Is YC turning into a kind of fight club? | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Since inception, Y Combinator has invested in thousands of startups, and more recently, even hundreds within a single batch. Given the accelerator’s growth, competitive tensions feel nearly inevitable. Still, one has to wonder if there is a fundamental shift afoot. Whereas YC always backed companies that might at some point overlap, the outfit appeared to casting its net far and wide, bringing in different startups at different stages from different geographies — companies that used each other’s products and formed tight bonds through YC’s active alumni network. Now, however, YC seems to be actively leaning into startups that are roughly the same age, operating in the same countries and targeting exactly the same opportunity with nearly identical business models. Indeed, while similar types of companies within a class had grown inescapable as YC’s class sizes have ballooned, a kind of sameness is more apparent than ever with its latest batch of 400 startups. In fact, it’s beginning to look like the plan here is to back as many nascent rival teams as possible — then let them duke it out. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Y Combinator sees things differently. At least, asked about the many startups that would seem to compete from the outset, a spokeswoman for YC writes in an email: “These companies are not in the same groups and do not interact. Also, it is common for startups to pivot during the batch.” In the meantime, we’ve rounded up some of the startups that seem to to overlap — a lot — within its Winter 2022 batch. Founded in the same year and same location, TradeX and Better Opinions have the same goal: give people a way to bet — and win — money on their predictions. The startups are building platforms where people can trade money while betting on whether or not an outcome will happen, from a movie launch to who the next president will be. There are more serious future events to bet on as well, such as climate change, inflation and whether omicron cases will rise or fall in a particular location. The only clear difference between the two companies is that TradeX is targeting higher income Indians and Better Opinions is branding itself more around inclusivity and accessibility. As early as 2018, our own Romain Dillet was using WireGuard, a faster and more secure alternative to existing VPN software. Firezone and Netmaker, both participants in this batch of Y Combinator startups, are open source VPNs built atop WireGuard. Netmaker claims it’s 15x faster than OpenVPN, a popular VPN software, while Firezone says it’s 4x faster. But speed isn’t everything — the competitor cohort-mates will have to battle it out to offer better customer service, firewall options and ease of use than the other. Both startups have a free plan and a paid plan for larger business teams, but neither company is sharing pricing for these paid plans, so we can’t compare their price points just yet. Consider that Streak and Yodaa are both less than two years old, both based in Bangalore, and both trying to build banking businesses that cater to teenagers by both educating them on their spending and helping them to save. (Both also offer a gamified approach, wherein kids can earn coins for certain spending behaviors.) It’s fairly plain these two will be vying for the same customers, who probably won’t be using two different banking apps. ( .) All of these companies are personal financial adviser startups that are based in Jakarta and have been founded in the last year or two. Yes, Indonesia is a big market, but also, come on. Tradezi is a months-old, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam-based startup that calls itself the “Robinhood for Southeast Asia.” What it does (or will do): offers free online trading accounts that allows users to invest in stocks, crypto and other alternative assets in one place. It sounds a lot like Anfin, which is a year-old, Ho Chi Minh City-based startup that’s building a digital brokerage in Vietnam connecting users to the stock market in “a simple and intuitive way.” Investors could sign up for both companies’ brokerage accounts, but would they? The insurance market, particularly for vehicles, is far from saturated in Latin America, with just 30% of cars and 10% of motorcycles covered, according to Clupp, an online insurance startup that was founded in 2021 and is based in Mexico City. Indeed, Clupp sees a big opportunity in providing more affordable insurance for low-risk drivers in Latin America. And so does Momento, which was also founded in 2021 and based in Mexico City and is also looking to insure the region’s drivers and motorcycle riders. The big difference (for now): Momento says it is working through the regulatory process to be a fully licensed insurance carrier; Clupp appears to be working a fully licensed insurance carrier to offer its products (Mapfre for cars and HDI for motorcycles). Before this year, YC hadn’t backed a food delivery startup in Africa. So it was a bit surprising to see two of this type of company — beU delivery and HeyFood — in a single batch. We understand that YC is excited to back food delivery businesses after seeing . These startups operate in far apart African markets — beU delivery in Ethiopia and HeyFood in Nigeria — but over time, they’ll expand into similar markets and compete for the same customers in their bids to become the region’s top delivery platform. Both platforms, founded in 2021 and based in Lagos, play in the identity verification space. Dojah claims to be an “all-in-one know-your-customer (KYC) and identity verification platform for Africa,” while Identity Pass says its infrastructure makes it possible for digital businesses in Africa to “easily verify their customers within seconds.” It’s easy to assume that the market is enormous for both players, but customers will have to choose one of two services or switch periodically depending on speed, level of insights they offer, who fights fraud better and price points. Naturally, even startups with a different take may be jockeying for the space soon enough. As we have seen with fintech especially, all financial technology products . This is why SoFi now features stock investing, Robinhood offers a debit card and so forth. Once you go through the work of bringing a consumer into the fold, you want them to sell them as many products as possible — so you keep adding. That means that regardless of where this cohort is starting (some are robo advisers, some Robinhood clones, some neobanks, some insurtech, are tackling carbon emissions), Y Combinator has invested money and energy into numerous companies that could find themselves competing with one another sooner rather than later. While they may form friendships and become one another’s customers, you can also easily foresee, in some markets, more battle royale than mere dustup. |
Apple and Major League Baseball to livestream 12 weeks of Friday night games for free | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Earlier this month, Apple its first live sports deal with Major League Baseball to bring a number of games and other MLB content to the Apple TV+ service for the 2022 season. Today, Apple unveiled the first 12 weeks of its “ ” doubleheader schedule, which it now says will be freely available to anyone with internet access — without the need for an Apple TV+ subscription. Previously, Apple had hinted some of its Friday Night games would be available for free for a “limited time,” but didn’t detail how many. The offering could entice more users to try out Apple TV+ before committing to a subscription. Apple confirmed to TechCrunch consumers won’t need to sign up for a TV+ subscription, nor a free trial, in order to stream the games for free. Apple says the first half of its “Friday Night Baseball” schedule is set to premiere on April 8. The first game in the schedule will see the New York Mets facing off against the Washington Nationals, live from Nationals Park in Washington, D.C., at 7 PM ET. After that, Apple TV+ will broadcast the Houston Astros versus the Los Angeles Angels live from Angel Stadium at 9:30 PM ET. The “Friday Night Baseball” doubleheader will then continue to be available to baseball fans across eight countries on Apple TV+ throughout the regular season. The first half of the schedule, which runs through June 24, can be found . There’s no word yet on if Apple plans to make the Friday night games running in the second half of the season free, as well. The start of the MLB season had been due to a labor dispute, but that’s now resolved. U.S. fans will also be able to tune in to a new live show called “MLB Big Inning,” which will feature highlights and look-ins and will air every night during the regular reason. And fans in both the U.S. and Canada will gain access to a new 24/7 livestream with MLB game replay, news, analysis, highlights, classic games and more, as well as on-demand programming that includes highlights and other original MLB content. The games and shows will stream across the Apple TV+ service, where they won’t be subject to local broadcast restrictions. Apple also noted that the MLB will commemorate Jackie Robinson Day on April 15, to mark the 75th anniversary of the Hall of Famer’s Major League debut. On that night, Apple’s “Friday Night Baseball” will run special coverage featuring former American League Jackie Robinson Rookie of the Year Randy Arozarena, the Tampa Bay Rays visiting All-Star shortstop Tim Anderson and the Chicago White Sox. In addition, last season’s National League Jackie Robinson Rookie of the Year Jonathan India and the Cincinnati Reds will be hosted by 2020 National League MVP Freddie Freeman and his new Dodger teammates, as part of the celebration. Apple says that other presentation details, including additional game schedules throughout the regular season, broadcast teams, production enhancements and pre- and post-game coverage will be announced at a later date. The streaming service’s “Friday Night Baseball” offering will include live pre- and post-game shows. The new “Friday Night Baseball” schedule will mark Apple’s first foray into live sports, which is something it was looking to add to its streaming service for quite some time. However, the launch is also an example of how Apple is able to leverage its market position and sizable coffers to do something that other streamers could struggle with: offering free live sports as a means of marketing its service to potential subscribers. The games can be accessed across devices where Apple TV+ is found, including on Apple’s TV app on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV, along with select smart TVs, gaming consoles and cable set-top boxes. |
Uber and Lyft drivers say fuel surcharge is ‘an insult to drivers’ | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | Nearly half of Uber and Lyft drivers in the U.S. have quit or are driving less due to high gas prices caused by Russia’s war in Ukraine, despite added to fares by those ride-hailing companies, according to a survey shared with TechCrunch. “Forty-three percent of Uber and Lyft drivers still say they’re driving less or have quit completely despite the new fuel surcharges,” Harry Campbell, founder and CEO of (RSG), a blog and podcast dedicated to helping rideshare drivers earn more money and stay on top of industry news, told TechCrunch. “This compares to 53% of drivers who said the same before the fuel surcharges were announced.” The Rideshare Guy originally polled drivers on how they felt about the rising gas prices, collecting 325 responses from Uber and Lyft drivers between March 7 and March 11 via email and social media. When the surcharges were announced in mid-March — a fee of $0.45 to $0.55 per ride for Uber customers, and $0.55 for Lyft customers, to go directly to the drivers — RSG sent out another poll between March 22 and March 24, this time collecting 252 responses. “Many drivers say that the fuel surcharges are not enough and they would have preferred to see a per-mile surcharge to account for the increased fuel expenditure on long trips instead of a flat fee,” said Campbell. A Lyft driver in Orlando, Florida told TechCrunch the $0.55 per trip surcharge is “an insult to the drivers.” It’s hard to calculate the average rides per driver per day, but to put the fuel surcharges in perspective, if a driver averages 15 fares per day, they will get an additional $8.25 per day at the $0.55 surcharge rate. The average price of gas in the U.S. is $4.246, as of Monday, according to data from the . A year ago, the average was $2.859. Both Uber and Lyft saw a year-over-year increase in revenue from 2020 to 2021, which both have said is in part thanks to increased trips to airports as post-pandemic travel increases. Airport trips are good drivers of revenue growth because they’re typically longer and therefore cost more; however, it’s exactly trips like these that drivers say require more than a standard $0.55 surcharge. Driver Angela Ryan, who shared with RSG that she stopped driving entirely due to the high gas prices, suggests Uber and Lyft implement a fluctuating surcharge, one that’s smaller for shorter trips and larger for longer rides or ones that are more labor- and gas-intensive. For example, an additional surcharge for rides where drivers have to carry luggage, groceries or anything else that adds weight to a car, or rides that require driving up hilly or mountainous neighborhoods, which would expend more gas. “ While Uber and Lyft have diversified their revenue streams, with Uber increasingly focusing on freight and delivery, and Lyft successfully implementing bikeshare programs across the country, both companies mainly attribute their respective year-over-year revenue growths to ride-hailing, which means retaining drivers has to be a top priority. This is something Uber understands, although . Last April, Uber launched to incentivize drivers back onto the app after the pandemic saw drivers leaving in droves. When in early February, CEO Logan Green said the company had sustained driver recovery in the fourth quarter, with active drivers hitting a new pandemic high that the company expected to maintain despite the Omicron variant. That was obviously before the gas prices shot up, although Lyft told TechCrunch it hasn’t seen a decline in the number of drivers on the platform or the hours they drive in March when compared to January. Uber also said it has not seen a decrease in the number of active drivers on its U.S. platform over the last several month, noting that last week was actually a post-pandemic high in terms of active drivers. The survey results show that the surcharges have brought some drivers back, at least. Before the surcharges, 36% of drivers said they were driving the same amount, whereas after the surcharges, that number jumped to 43%. After the surcharges, 30% and 13% said they were driving less or quit because of gas prices, respectively, compared to 38% and 15% before. However, generally, drivers don’t appear to be happy with the surcharge. The survey found 39% of Uber drivers and 42% of Lyft drivers said they were not satisfied with the fuel surcharge. Only 28% of drivers were satisfied with the Uber fuel surcharge, and 21% were satisfied with Lyft’s. About a third of Uber and Lyft drivers responded noncommittally to the question. “ Christopher Patrick said he hadn’t changed his driving habits but doesn’t expect fuel prices to come down. While he believes Uber and Lyft should have added this surcharge two weeks sooner, he says it’s a step toward acknowledging the increasing cost of doing business for drivers. “Reducing [Uber/Lyft’s] take as the TNC or increasing the per-mile/time compensation are longer-term requirements to maintain the available drivers in these high inflation times,” said Patrick. |
A look at all 35 international fintech startups at YC’s winter 2022 Demo Day | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | As more banking, e-commerce and insurance startups work to improve the way business is done in emerging countries, it should come as no surprise that this winter’s Y Combinator batch is rife with related efforts. There are 35 companies this year, just over double the amount in the 2021 winter batch and up from 18 in the summer program, according to the organization’s directory. What you’ll notice about this year’s cohort is the prevalence of companies from Nigeria, Indonesia and Argentina, all areas that have seen an abundance of venture capital funding into fintech in recent years, though nearly every country at this point is attracting investor interest. Indeed, according to CB Insights, global fintech funding reached a record $132 billion in 2021, more than two times the amount related companies raised in 2020 and accounting for a whopping 21% of all venture dollars. Herewith, the startups, with some of our quick thoughts about the broader problem each is trying to solve.
2021
5
Jakarta, Indonesia
Digital health insurance provider
Providing end-to-end healthcare benefits, including wellness features, online healthcare, medication delivery, with simple clicks and fast processes. Users have unlimited availability to speak with doctors.
“Aigis is committed to providing health benefits to employees and ease the insurance claim process. Also, we bring various insurance packages and will help you to choose your package.”
Among them is Reinhart Hermanus, a former software engineer.
As in many places, Indonesia’s economy is growing fast — . That also means that, as in many places, employers are finding it harder to retain talent, so benefits that are available and readily accessible are of growing importance.
2021
40
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Building a digital brokerage in Vietnam connecting users to the stock market in “a simple and intuitive way” by charging low transaction fees and giving investors the ability to buy and sell up to 150 top stocks from the “most prestigious institutions in Vietnam.”
Intuitive design through experimentation, expanded access through fractional shares and financial literacy through modern forms of education.
Says it makes it easy for a user to invest knowledgeably by offering ways to improve financial literacy.
Michael Do is a former investment banker, and Phuoc Tran is a serial entrepreneur who most recently founded another startup that he says distributes $36 million in GTV monthly.
This model has proven successful in the U.S. but Robinhood, for example, has been accused of taking advantage of inexperienced users. The fact that it says it is offering financial literacy is promising, but time will tell if it executes on that promise.
2021
Jakarta, Indonesia
6
It likens itself to a “Coinbase Earn for Southeast Asia.”
“We make crypto investing safe and easy for consumer and businesses through DeFi yielding.”
Simplicity. “People can deposit and withdraw in three clicks. Right after deposit, they might earn competitive interest with no hidden fees. The interest is obtained from DeFi protocols.”
Ghuniyu Fattah Rozaq, who was previously a mobile app developer with a transportation management company called Ritase.com, and Fransiskus Raymond.
Trade in crypto assets is surging in Indonesia, with 2021 transactions reaching a reported 859 trillion rupiah ($59.83 billion), up from just 60 trillion rupiah in 2020. Meanwhile, startups are trying to figure out how to feed this appetite without running afoul of concerned officials, who in January financial service institutions from using, marketing and/or facilitating crypto asset trading.
2021
3
San José, Costa Rica
Building a one-stop-shop mobile investment app for Latin American consumers.
Gives users the “investment tools of the 1%,” including access to U.S. stocks and crypto.
Includes Robert Baron and James Jara, developers who previously worked together at the Latin American fintech Wink and blockchain startup BlockCorp.
Botin is one of at least six companies in this batch aiming to serve the growing global base of retail investors, though it is the only one that appears focused on consumers outside of Asia.
2021
9
Nairobi, Kenya
Enables African businesses to issue corporate expense cards and control and track their spending.
“Instant” card issuance with “real-time” visibility into spending.
“We are building the first corporate card that supports mobile money, banks and card schemes payment workflows.”
CEO Alphas Sinja, whose prior experience is in startup fundraising, and product lead Robert Nyangate, who previously co-founded and served as CTO at point-of-sale outfit Xoko.
Investors have been eager to back corporate card and expense management startups. YC S20 participant Jeeves in six months to $2.1 billion, TechCrunch reported, and Ramp, another big name in the space, this month after a blockbuster year for revenue growth. Boya could look to these U.S.-based companies’ success as a blueprint for growth in the African market.
Website:
2020
2
Santiago, Chile
Allows Latin American companies to make payments with local wire transfers via a single API.
Giving businesses a way to take control of their payments with virtual cards issued instantly.
It claims to “easily identify all charges” made to their cards and that user companies the ability to organize cards by area or employee.
Cristóbal Grinbergs and Sebastián Hernández say they are passionate about working in fintech in LatAm.
The API model is attractive to some companies, but there are many startups offering virtual cards that Cardda will have to work hard to differentiate itself.
2021
12
Mexico City, Mexico
Online insurer with affordable insurance for low-risk drivers.
Offering up to 40% lower premiums by focusing on either low-mileage drivers or those with good driving habits.
Providing an appropriate product for most vehicles that includes price, payment options and distribution channels. In addition to developing technology to identify and offer affordable insurance for any vehicle, its tool includes gamification and payment options for the unbanked population.
Among them is Marisol Sánchez, chief operation officer, a self-proclaimed expert in Mexico’s insurtech market, who is focused on claims and fraud detection. She says she is also president of the Mexican Insurtech Association.
Mexico has become one of the world’s leading producers and exporters of motor vehicles over the last 30 years; relatedly, Mexico’s middle class has grown and, along with it, car ownership, so more car insurance options make obvious sense (even while we can’t speak to this team’s abilities).
2021
5
Mexico City, Mexico
Providing “accessible” and “flexible capital” to SMBs and entrepreneurs who sell online in the region so they can invest in their own digital businesses.
“Collections are made on a percentage of daily sales. This model encourages Latinos to work with debt because they don’t worry about fixed fees/terms.”
Emiliano Musalem, the founder and CEO, says he he was part of the launching team of Rappi, the Colombian on-demand delivery startup
: With so-called flexible capital, a startup secures funds to grow their business without giving away further ownership; meanwhile, lenders can do what they do best, which is make interest of off the capital they’re handing out. While debt can be dangerous if the music stops at some point (and there is still that loan to pay off!), startups in the U.S. have increasingly turned to it. It makes sense that startups in Mexico — which have far fewer traditional venture funding options — would be intrigued by the model, too. :
2019
30
Lagos, Nigeria
Building an API to sell and process insurance in emerging markets, with an emphasis on Africa.
Curacel allows any hospital that has a management system to connect their system to the startups’ APIs. The company aims to build the rails needed to reach millions of users across its nine markets by building out a full tech stack to enable embedded insurance products, co-founder Henry Mascot told TechCrunch .
Curacel has integrated with 22 tech entities across Africa, allowing them to provide insurance products. By making these products readily available to users of popular digital technologies through its API, the company hopes to bolster the access and uptake of insurance in Africa, where penetration stands at less than 3%.
Mascot started a company in 2017 to help hospitals digitize records. He teamed up with Curacel co-founder and CTO John Dada two years later to build a fraud detection system for a health insurance company. Working on the fraud detection project revealed to the pair how technology could help solve fundamental issues for insurance providers, thus Curacel was born.
Smartphone and affordable internet adoption is increasing across Africa, providing headwinds for its insurtech sector. Because insurance penetration is still so low in Curacel’s markets, the company can capture market share alongside other African insurtechs such as Lami Technologies.
2018
30
Buenos Aires, Argentina
Enables banks in LatAm to digitize their loan origination and account opening process.
Says it will help financial institutions “open a new sales channel in a simple, fast and accessible way.”
Co-founder Hernan Lopez Conde spent nearly seven years at McKinsey & Co.
Banks everywhere are scrambling to digitize. This startup says it has 30 clients, including seven banks in nine countries. Not bad with no major funding!
2021
6
Lagos, Nigeria
A “Venmo for B2B” in Africa.
Enabling businesses to simplify their payment flows.
From , “Besides providing tools that enable B2B companies to digitize their payment flows, there’s a no-code tool for them to optimize trade with their business customers, vendors and suppliers. The platform also helps these companies to generate or pay invoices, offer credit to their business customers and a dashboard to attribute payment flows to a particular customer, retailer or location.”
Among them is Tunde Akinnuwa, who says he is a serial entrepreneur that previously worked in logistics and financial services.
When traditional distributors move goods from manufacturers and suppliers to retailers, they collect cash through a network of agents, which is highly efficient and susceptible to fraud; trying to make cash obsolete very plainly makes sense — which is why a lot of regional startups are now focused on doing this.
2021
8
Lagos, Nigeria
Offers a “Five-minute payroll payment solution” for African startups and SMEs, similar to that of U.S.-based Gusto.
“Eazipay processes eight payroll payment types (Taxes, Pension, Insurances, etc) with just one-click and with our own payment infrastructure. Eazipay Payroll APIs are also available for neobanks and commercial banks — to reach at least 50,000 businesses.”
Traction. Eazipay shared numbers reflecting this on its YC profile. “We have grown from 10 businesses in January to over 200 with over $5,000 MRR,” the company says.
CEO and co-founder Asher Adeniyi previously founded Gidijobs, a Nigerian recruitment platform that Adeniyi says has an ARR of $1.2 million. Adeniyi’s co-founders are data scientist Kingsley Michael and Eazipay product and growth lead Efosa Uwoghiren.
Payroll and bookkeeping pose key logistical hurdles for SMEs. Eazipay’s fellow cohort member Grey, also headquartered in Lagos, also seeks to solve challenges workers face in getting paid, as does Hanoi, Vietnam-based GIMO (also a YC W22 startup).
2021
11
Jakarta, Indonesia
Personal financial platform
Creating a single view of a user’s finances from 22 banks, investment platforms and e-wallets to help them get control of their finances.
Offering the most comprehensive account integrations and personal finance tools in Indonesia.
Among them is Shyam Kalairajah, who says he is “passionate about expanding access to financial services in South East Asia.” Kalairajah previously worked at BCG, Barclays Bank and NGOs, focused on financial inclusion in developing markets.
This is a hot area that has attracted a of funding already (some of the personal finance apps in Indonesia to raise funding, including Pluang, Ajaib, Bibit and FUNDtastic). All focus on making investing accessible to more people by giving them an alternative to traditional brokerage firms that typically charge high fees. Clearly this startup thinks there’s room for more players here. :
: 2019
: 10
: Madrid, Spain
: All-in-one expense management automation
: Helping European companies manage card payments and reimbursements. We automatize expense management so that the employees, bookkeepers, and CFOs can save money and time. We are working toward a future we call “pay and leave.” Where the employee just has to pay and the receipt is directly sent from the merchant to Fuell, without the employee having to do anything.
: “We are working toward a future we call ‘pay and leave’ where the employee just has to pay and the receipt is directly sent from the merchant to Fuell without the employee having to do anything.”
: Eduardo Ortiz de Lanzagorta Gonzalez, who said he started his first VC-backed fintech while finishing his engineering degree. Then he co-founded what he touts as “the most active seed fund in Spain.”
2019
40
Hanoi, Vietnam
Help underbanked workers get paid anytime, anywhere.
Partnering up with corporate employers to provide a mobile financial application as a benefit to their employees, aiming at changing the way the employees earn, spend, save and invest.
Among them is Quan Nguyen, co-founder and CEO, a former Citibank executive who managed its consumer banking division and led capital raising and investments.
Startups that help workers access their earned wages faster have sprung up around the globe, and Vietnam is no exception. In fact, YC graduated a very similar company in Vietnam last year called Nano Technologies that quickly raised in funding from both local and U.S.-based investors.
2020
15
Lagos, Nigeria
A provider of foreign bank accounts for Africans to serve as an alternative to foreign currency exchange offices.
Users can earn payments including salaries from individuals and companies abroad, hold their savings in a foreign currency, and convert their savings to their local currency.
Other options for foreign exchange of currency are limited, with the main incumbent being Nigeria’s physical Bureau De Change (BDC) offices, which can be inefficient and complicated for customers to use, in part due to local regulation. Grey’s virtual accounts, provided in USD, GBP and EUR, are domiciled abroad, which shields them from the impact of local challenges, Grey CEO Idorenyin Obong told TechCrunch’s Tage Kene-Okafor last month.
Idorenyin Obong and Femi Aghedo. Obong has worked remotely as a software developer for international companies for most of his career, which exposed him to the challenges customers face when exchanging foreign currency for local currency.
Virtual foreign bank accounts are becoming increasingly common among African fintechs, with companies like Techstars-backed PayDay and infrastructure provider Fincra offering similar products. Grey’s inclusion in the YC W22 cohort also underscores this batch’s status as the largest for African startups to date.
2020
59
Mexico City, Mexico
A B2B SaaS outfit focused on business banking and credit for small and midsize businesses in Latin America.
Banking suite that help SMBs gain visibility and control of their treasury; unlimited debit accounts in one place; expenses management platform and prepaid cards; and payroll payment systems.
Unlike other “BNPL companies, we need no integration or alliance with the commerce. Once our client gets their credit card, they start paying at any commerce, online or physical, and with the help of our app, decide the number of months to pay the purchase.”
Among these is Eder Echeverria, a self-described “happiness entrepreneur” who previously logged more than seven years at a financial services outfit called Nomi Fin in Mexico.
So-called challenger banks continue to be all the rage, with investors eager to fund them. In the U.S. and Europe, that spells tons of competition, though in Mexico, it’s still early days.
2021
13
Lagos, Nigeria
A digital bank for Africa’s 50 million businesses.
The company enables startups and retail outlets to easily pay vendors and suppliers while also performing cross-border payment and access to growth capital.
Lenco claims it is better than a bank because in addition to bank accounts and credit cards, it also offers invoicing and expense management.
Among them is CEO Andrew Airelobhegbe, who says he was previously co-founder and CEO at ogaVenue, which he described as “Nigeria’s largest online event venue booking portal.”
In Nigeria, there are more than 40 million micro-businesses underserved by banking services. YC sees this and has been funding more companies like Lenco, including, last year, a startup called Prospa that in seed funding last fall.
2021
12
Lagos, Nigeria
Community bank for Africa.
Financing to mobile money agents in five minutes using a community lending system.
The company said it achieved 99% repayment from over 10,000 loans disbursed through the community-based system compared to competitors that “rely on databases of local credit bureaus to give out loans.”
Among them is CEO Femi Iromini, who says he previously worked with The World Bank Group.
This is another area that YC clearly sees as beginning to show promise, with past YC companies that include CrowdForce (which raised in funding last month) and Kudi (it raised last summer at a $500 million valuation).
2020
18
Bogota, Colombia
A bank account that integrates LatAm SMEs’ finances and operations.
A corporate bank account that integrates with accounting, tax and payroll systems allowing small and medium-sized business owners in Latin America to manage their business in just one place.
CEO Salomon Zarruk, a lawyer formerly with Baker McKenzie, has expertise in financial regulation; CPO Juan Camilo Poveda is a former product manager at Movii and Nubank; CTO Sebastian Ortiz was a founder at Tpaga (YC S17); and COO Jose Tomas Lobo is a former country manager at Laboratoria in Chile.
2016
60
Kampala, Uganda
Working capital for micro-businesses in Africa.
After downloading the app, business owners can apply for loans in minutes and if approved, can receive capital within a day.
“We have figured out how to score and disburse unsecured loans to cash-based businesses that have no digital transaction history, while maintaining excellent collection rates. In the past 12 months we have provided $7.5 million in working capital to 13,000 businesses in East Africa.”
Among them is Mina Shahid, co-founder and CEO, who says he is a two-time founder and previously worked with co-founder Ben Best at another lending company in Ghana that failed.
As our colleague Tage puts it, in Uganda, “businesses deal mostly with informal providers, some of which are loan sharks. Numida, a startup founded six years ago, is positioning itself as the foremost digital option.”
2018
14
Panama City, Panama
Enables LatAm companies to launch financial products with an API. Says its mission is to make fintech accessible in Latin America for any company looking to embed financial services.
Companies can use PayCaddy to open digital wallets with KYC checks, automate online payments and issue personalized debit and prepaid cards for customers or employees.
Its use of an API gives it an edge in that it has the potential to ease some of the load of in-house development teams.
Co-founder Juan Diego Galvez has been working in electronic payments since 2016, helping mid-and large-sized companies handle cross-border payments.
APIs are hot; the fact that PayCaddy has developed one could make it easier for it to attract customers.
2020
12
Lagos, Nigeria
Tools and infrastructure for easy access to cryptocurrency in Africa.
Ability to launch a crypto exchange in minutes and be able to send and receive money from friends and family and exchange crypto for local currency. There is no sign-up required and zero fees.
The company describes itself as “customer-focused” and guarantees that it can deliver on faster, easier and cheaper for any product it develops.
Among them is CEO Bashir Aminu, who said he previously built Coinprofile, a similar company enabling the sending and receiving of cryptocurrency.
In terms of crypto adoption around the world, Nigeria is in large part because it sees huge transaction volumes on peer-to-peer platforms; Payourse’s way to ride the wave is to enable more outfits to jump into the fray (and take a cut when they do).
2021
Singapore
15
It’s a Bill.com for Southeast Asia.
Enabling SMBs and startups to streamline their customer collections and vendor payments.
Customers get paid faster and save more on vendor payment fees.
Saurabh Chauhan and Dmitry Vedenyapin. Chauhan was formerly a managing director with Daraz, a Rocket Internet-backed e-commerce marketplace. He also spent seven months as founder-in-residence with Entrepreneur First; Vedenyapin was also a founder-in-residence with Entrepreneur First and, before that, was CTO of the aviation company AirAsia.
Over half a million small and midsize businesses in Asia don’t have a scalable revenue collections process, according to the company. We don’t know that this team is the one to eventually fix the issue, but it’s a big opportunity it’s chasing.
2020
18
Jakarta, Indonesia
Designing and building the future of personal finance with a mission to help everyone achieve financial freedom by providing products and advice that make complicated financial decisions simple and relevant.
Enabling users to set savings goals and manage their finances “holistically” by integrating money management and investing into one app.
Users can see their net worth, monthly cash flow and how their budget has changed over the past several months. They also have the option of choosing a portfolio that is already built for building their own.
Among them is Christian Hermawan, who says he spent over 20 years in the capital markets.
YC invested in numerous personal finance apps in Indonesia this time around, including Finku (above). Presumably YC would say these teams aren’t in direct competition, but … they kind of seem like they are?
2021
2
Lagos, Nigeria
Provide payment rails and APIs to help African merchants and consumers easily move money in and out of Africa.
: Says Tage, our colleague in Nigeria, While there are a plethora of fintechs like Chipper Cash and NALA enabling P2P cross border payments within and outside the continent, none is a clear winner yet. That’s why startups such as Plumter and Grey still see opportunities in the space and are bundling enticing features to woo customers from already existing platforms.”
2019
Buenos Aires, Argentina
18
Payments orchestration and recurring billing platform for Latin American companies.
“Rebill saves the card on file and allows merchants to increase their acceptance rates by linking multiple payment gateways in a single transaction. It offers full flexibility to manage any type of recurring billing scenario and provides advanced metrics for any e-commerce or SaaS company.”
Nahuel Candia, who worked most recently as an IT consultant and worked previously at a social commerce platform with another of the team’s founders, Ariel Diaz Ailan.
This is still a nascent space, and one that’s just now beginning to attract capital. Indeed, an earlier YC startup that’s offering payments orchestration software and services to LatAm startups — Plug Pagamentos — announced in seed funding in November.
2022
9
Jakarta Indonesia
Fintech for teenagers in Indonesia.
This is a finance app for young adults, but also for parents. “Share practical experiences in managing finances so [your] children grow up financially smart.”
Among them is Agnes Lie, who previously logged time at Boston Consulting Group and more recently served as the VP of growth marketing for Ovo, an Indonesia payments, rewards and financial services platform
There’s growing awareness — everywhere — that teens don’t receive enough education about money and finance at school. Apps like these help teach them while giving parents some control over the kids’ spending and one need look no further than at the kid-focused fintech in the U.S. to appreciate the potential investors see.
2021
20
Jakarta, Indonesia
AI-powered personal financial adviser in (and for) Indonesia.
“We help our users make better money decisions with our wealth management tools and give personalized saving advice based on their financial habits.”
Nadia Amalia worked previously as an investment analyst at Deutsche Bank and has a master’s degree in Finance from MIT.
Investors love robo-advisery firms and this is a relatively untapped market, which has some related startups raising big bucks, including Bibit.id, a digital investment app in Indonesia that last May raised in a funding round led by Sequoia Capital India.
2019
55
Lagos, Nigeria
Digitizes and processes micro-transactions in Africa.
“We process cash-based micro-transactions across Africa’s informal sector [such as] payment for bus rides. [Today] we help over 300,000 people make this payment.”
Olamide Afolabi previously founded a regional payment services company; Michael Oluwole was his director of strategy and operations.
: This startup’s contactless card may seem comparatively low tech, but it’s gaining traction. As the founders earlier this year, because they live in Lagos, they understood that a radical change that was too different from what people were used to would not work used in paying bus fares.
2022
5
Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
A “Robinhood for Southeast Asia.”
Offers free online trading accounts that users can set up in “just three taps,” allowing them to invest in stocks, crypto and other alternative assets in one place.
“We provide our users the most seamless and reliable investing experience to meet the current unprecedented growth in Southeast Asia — which is something most incumbent players are struggling with.”
Phi Dang and Jasmine Huynh, software engineers with combined experience leading technical teams at Google, Meta and Microsoft.
Young, digitally savvy users in Southeast Asia present a huge, untapped opportunity for retail investing platforms. Tradezi isn’t the only company aiming to become the Robinhood of its region — Anfin, another startup in the YC W22 batch, is also building a retail trading app based in Vietnam, and PINA, also in this cohort, calls itself the “Wealthfront of Indonesia.” Outside of YC, seed-stage Infina raised funding in 2021 for a similar product, and Futu Holdings, which has been called “China’s Robinhood,” is investing into international expansion.
2019
50
Jakarta, Indonesia
Think Brex for Indonesia.
Providing businesses with global payments, expenses and corporate
cards in one integrated experience.
CEO Edo Windratno says he studied industrial engineering at the Institut Teknologi Bandung and that has founded previous companies (these aren’t listed on LinkedIn, unfortunately); CTO Bondan Herumurti spent much of the last decade with the Jakarta-based software company Rubyh.co
In another hint that YC is perfectly happy to bet on startups that will eventually duke it out, Transfez is poised to bump up against another of YC’s portfolio companies: Volopay, a Singapore-based fintech startup that last month raised in Series A funding and reportedly plans to use the funds to expansion to Indonesia.
2021
13
Jakarta, Indonesia
Brex for D2C brands and content creators in Indonesia
“UpBanx is Brex for D2C brands and content creators in Indonesia. Our platform enables customers to open a high-yield account, get financing and manage transactions in one place.”
Wafa Taftazani spent more than four years in business development at Google and has founded numerous companies.
: Investors are interested in all aspects of the creator economy; even while this startup would seem to be narrowing its prospects by specifically marketing its tech to content creators, the pitch could resonate right now.
2021
2
Mexico City, Mexico
Embedded finance platform for B2B in LatAm.
Democratizing access to financial services in LatAm by allowing any B2B company to launch fintech products and services.
“Banks do not have the infrastructure or technology to serve small businesses … Valari becomes an enabler of financial products distribution by making it simple for B2B platforms to launch their fintech services.”
Alejandro Pozo is the CEO and founder; he previously spent four years as an associate with Goldman Sachs
2022
9
Lagos, Nigeria
Enabling offline payments in Africa.
Providing an alternative payment infrastructure without the need for a payment card or consumer app so that customers can pay businesses from their phones without internet access.
Proprietary integration to banks, telecommunication companies and mobile money providers across Africa.
Among them is Kayode Disu, who says he has over 12 years of experience in building digital security and payments products for “the top banks and payment switches in West Africa.”
Stax, a similar startup that allows people to send and request money and transfer funds between accounts via automated USSD codes (that work like texts), just raised $2.2 million in seed extension funding. The reason, as our colleague Tage : in a market where internet-enabled app-based banking can reach 300 million subscribers on the continent, USSD technology, which is predominantly offline and used mainly by feature phones, outpaces it with 850 million connections.
2020
30
Córdoba, Argentina
The buy now, pay later startup describes itself as the “Affirm for LatAm.”
Underbanked consumers can create their free account to quickly access and pay without banks, in installments and without a card. Merchants with e-commerce channels can increase their sales and integrate Wibond in a very agile way by offering a new form of payment and expanding their markets.
Integrates directly into the purchase flow of online merchants.
One of its founders — Ezequiel Bucai — previously co-founded a company called ClickyPass, which was acquired by the U.S.-based unicorn Classpass in 2020 for an undisclosed amount.
Bucai’s previous exit is encouraging although there are a number of companies that have this same goal so it will be interesting to see how it plans to stand out from earlier movers in the region. |
India dominates Y Combinator’s latest startup batch (again) | Natasha Mascarenhas | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | is the most represented country, outside of the United States, within the latest Y Combinator accelerator batch: the Winter 2022 cohort sports 32 startups hailing from Gurugram, Bengaluru, Delhi, New Delhi, Hyderabad, Mumbai and Chennai. For what it’s worth, more than 191 companies in India have been funded through the Y Combinator accelerator, with nearly half — half! — of those companies accepted in the last 12 months. This batch’s companies, as we’ll discuss below, plan to tackle a diverse range of challenges within tech, but appear concentrated mostly within the financial services sector. Think ‘buy now, pay later’ pitches, savings-focused neobanks and, of course, bitcoin bets. It’s a contrast from prior showings, in which most of India’s YC startups fell into the B2B services category, but as we’ve seen, in terms of valuations and investor appetite – even despite a broader market correction. Other trends of note include a smattering of companies from Accel Atoms, a pre-seed program for early-stage founders in India, as well as many, many IIT graduates. Here’s a list of all W22 startups: 2021 in Gurugram, Haryana, India A kind of futures market where people can trade money while betting on whether or not an outcome will happen, from a movie launch to who the next president will be. There are more serious future events to bet on, too, such as climate change, inflation and omicron cases. “Allowing people to trade on what they know rather than studying company financials or worrying about market conditions. We are making opinions investable,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. We know that alternative asset investing is gaining momentum, thanks to collectibles and NFTs. TradeX is betting that futures markets — which have been tried in the past but failed to generate enough interest from investors to succeed — will find an audience, too. It might have found inspiration in , a U.S. startup that is similarly hoping to entice a new generation of traders to bet on all kinds of possible outcomes (and that has itself raised money from Sequoia Capital, Henry Kravis, and Charles Schwab). TradeX has already , per Entrackr. 2020 in Bengaluru, India The startup combines the idea of cash-back rewards with crypto. “We help people accumulate free bitcoin as cash back and rewards every time they shop in India,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. The startup previously went through Atoms, Accel’s pre-seed funding program and GoSats already has an 85,000 person community with 1,000 new users coming every day. By avoiding going the exchange route, and instead sitting on top of how people use and transact in both coins and cash, GoSats could be a ripe acquisition target – or a platform that brings a services business to crypto. / Getty Images 2021 in Gurugram, India. A platform for users to trade opinions and win money if they’re right. The prediction platform lets folks bet on everyday topics, such as COVID-19 case rates or the winner of tonight’s cricket game. “When we start allowing trading in categories such as cricket, politics and entertainment, not only do we make trading more relatable, but we also help improve their financial literacy,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. Are we missing something? Better Opinions feels like a direct competitor to TradeX. 2020 in Bengaluru, India A way for brick-and-mortar shops to audit videos for standard operating procedures. The company uses artificial intelligence through CCTV cameras to monitor quality and make faster business decisions. We like the idea of your neighborhood bodega catching up with real-time alerts when it comes to walk-ins, customers, and, heck, floor mopping compliance. It’s just, ultimately, we’d love to see the remote auditing company boast more privacy and user security shout outs on their website. 2021 in Bengaluru, India Already having raised $1 million in seed backing, Fello is a gaming and finance application that helps India’s Gen Z and young millennials learn how to save money. Users can save and invest in financial assets, and also win money if they win games. “Just within a short span of 12 weeks of launch, we onboarded 250,000 users with 92% of them being referred users, 88% of them being first-time investors who are spending over 12 minutes on an average per day on the app saving and playing games together!” the company wrote on the Y combinator blog. Personal finance clearly matters internationally, however savings with a twist isn’t quite a new pitch. Fello needs a big differentiator to win sticky traction amid a competitive landscape, whether that’s an accessible user experience or a smart way to pitch its vision. 2021 in Bengaluru, India Self-described as a “Plaid for electric vehicles,” Telematica is building an API tool to bring the cloud to the burgeoning automotive subscription industry. Companies, using Telematica, can access the telematics, battery, and other mobility data of cars and control EV charging with one API. “The thing that fascinates us is that virtually 100% of them are connected to the cloud, which captures and stores telematics, battery, and other mobility data. Unfortunately, there is no easy way for companies to interact with them as there is no user-friendly API or developer portal provided by any brand. For all of these vehicles, we create a single, standardized API,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. The company claims that India’s electric vehicle market is growing, estimating that more than 40% of new car sales are expected to be electric by 2030. If this is the case, the early bet on the API that makes those cars work and can address their maintenance and fuel needs, could certainly be a big opportunity. 2021 in Bengaluru, India An online index where consumers can discover, organize, and order materials to enhance interior design efforts. The platform is made for construction and creative professionals. Since the company’s launch in January, per the co-founder, more than 5,000 architects and designers have joined the platform. “When there is so much data, it’s extremely important to ensure the discovery itself doesn’t become a burden itself. Material Depot makes it easy to let go of all the catalogues and phone numbers in your directory and look up your favorite materials (with their detailed specifications) that are just a click away,” Material Depot sounds similar to services offered by Houzz, which to monetize its home renovation service in the past. However, Material Depot’s focus on the enterprise instead of the consumer, and its scale of ambition, is noteworthy. The company wants to eventually focus on making the supply chain process more efficient, a need with a lot of monetary opportunity and clear demand. 2020 in New Delhi, India A healthcare company focused on affordability. The startup wants to give more consumers the “buy now, pay later” option when it comes to healthcare bills and other big ticket expenses. “80% Indians have no health insurance and 50% Indians are unable to pay for private healthcare,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. “We are targeting 100 [million] urban Indians who undertake on an average 1 healthcare procedure per year costing $200. This is a $20B dollar market opportunity.” Within the United States, there’ve been many swings at repayment services over the years, especially in health care. It makes sense: the bills are confusing, antiquated and often inaccessible based on how expensive a simple service can be. SaveIN wants to bring that model to India, which has its own challenges around billing and repayment. The big focus for SaveIN should be to gain provider trust as it seeks to optimize decades-long inefficiencies. 2019 in Bengaluru, India. AntWalk is an employee up-skilling platform for enterprises. The company helps employees develop their skill sets and gain new experience across roles including sales, customer success, general management and product. An up-skilling platform that empowers teams with continuous learning tracks to equip them with the right skills at the right time,” the company said on Y Combinator’s blog. Finally, an edtech company! As with any up-skilling platform, AntWalk’s success is only as powerful as its outcomes, and it’s unclear how the business tracks the impact of its courses. Elevating productivity levels and enhancing leadership qualities are strong pitches, and the company is smartly using a mix of live and asynchronous cohort-based learning to scale those teachings. We’re most interested in its claim of 1:1 interactions, meaning that employees may be given access to mentors and experts during certain times of the week. That — if scaled — could make for a real difference in efficacy. 2016 in Gurugram, India. One of the oldest startups in this batch’s India cohort, the 50-person software company wants to make it easier for companies to handle small legal disputes. Per Legistify’s website, the company has 7,000 registered lawyers, 10,000 covered courts, and has handled over 100,000 cases. “These companies have billions of dollars stuck in millions of such disputes that could easily be tracked and settled through our software,” Legal tech startups have long tried to bring order , so Legistify’s pitch isn’t too hard to understand. After all, every startup doesn’t need the same level of input and white-glove legal service (one might simply be incorporating a company, while another is filing a lawsuit, for example). We’d to see how Legistify monetizes its service, since flexibility for lawyers – and the rise of virtual practices – could create some competitive tensions. Image: Bryce Durbin / TechCrunch 2021 in Bengaluru, India. A better way for product teams to collect feedback from users. Blitzllama is building a SDK integration that can let teams ask questions throughout a product experience, and then tailor products accordingly. The company boasts a 32% average response rate from users, and tracks over 200,000 monthly responses. “With only a simple SDK integration, teams can ask questions to their users within product journeys and get highly contextual answers in minutes. This empowers teams to ship products that address users’ real problems,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. The no-code tool is a different, perhaps more direct take on community-first building. Right now, the service’s goal does feel simple, but can be tailored to fit client UI and user language preferences. It also provides one platform for companies to gain user research, instead of stringing together a bunch of different tools. Long term, Blitzllama will need to prove how it can be more proactive or tailored in gaining feedback. 2020 in Bengaluru, India. A UPI-based payments service that provides a pay later option to college students. The company says it uses alternative credit scoring models to get credit to a wider audience. More than 150 million people in India are not able to access formal credits in India either because of lack of financial data or low credit scores,” the company said on Y Combinator’s blog. “We use alternative credit scoring models to provide a Pay Later option on UPI to a wider audience.” Micro loan lending is a common way that we see accessibility and fintech companies overlap. In PayCrunch’s case, it is relying on a unified payments interface, a system that can bring multiple bank accounts, fund routes and payments into one app. it’s the first company to bring this technology to students in India (which we can’t verify) but again, it’s easy to see a massive potential customer base with this one. 2021 in New Delhi, India. A way to record and modify APIs without developers needing to touch the back-end. It is available as a browser extension and a desktop app, and claims it is already in production with over 40,000 developers across over 500 organizations. “As an Uber engineer, I’d like to test what happens when driver allotment API fails, is there an automatic retry or do we ask the user to retry, or does the app crash,” the company said on Y Combinator’s blog post. API startups have exploded (and thus fragmented) over the past few years. Requestly is smart to try to bring some sort of unification, and ease, to managing those different tools from a higher level. 2019 in New Delhi, India A suite of services for mobile-first businesses, specifically focused on managing documents via smartphones. The company says it has 3 million monthly active users over the last 18 months and grows that number at 10% per month. It has 2,000 paying customers to date. “With over 200M such businesses in India, at $15/year subscription price, this a $3B opportunity in India & much larger globally,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. Document scanning and cloud storage feels like a niche solution, so it will be interesting see how Kaagaz expands from here. A strength, presumably, is definitely ease of use, given that you can modify documents from your phone. 2021 in Hyderabad, India. An operating system for Indian classrooms. Edustack helps teachers assign digitized worksheets, and also send reminders, evaluate, and track engagement of those assignments. It’s free for teachers to use, and sells its platform – which includes customized worksheets and a consultant – to schools. “Edustack saves 1000’s of hours for teachers by helping them to assign digitized worksheets, send reminders, automate evaluation and instantaneously generate analytics. Digital worksheets are our wedge,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. Interactive worksheets can’t be where Edustack stops — after all, stack is in its name. We’re interested in seeing how Edustack builds more proactive and student-centered services into its platform, which smartly wants to digitize the antiquated paper-and-pen style school day. Testing and tutoring would be easy pivots, but, heck, surprise us! 2021 in Gurugram, India. Self-described as a “next generation social dialer app,” Tingo lets people set video ringtones for friends and family. While that may sound niche, its vision is much broader (and expands beyond India). Tingo wants to give users a whole new caller experience and app to use to connect with their close friends “Every day over 40K people use Tingo to set video ringtones for their friends and family. We are growing at 17% weekly and [have] handled 25M+ phone calls through the app in the last 2 month,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. The moonshot of the company is that it can convince India, and eventually the world, to use a new app when trying to get in touch with friends. It’s a social media play built atop short-form video, a form factor that we’ve already seen proven out with the rise of TikTok (which, obviously, continues to be a dominant force and could prove hard to topple). Bryce Durbin 2021 in Mumbai, India 11 An employee healthcare platform for companies in India enables employees to access unlimited health consultation and traditional hospital expenses. “Employers provide health insurance, but it is insufficient for most, we also offer an easy way for employees to expand their coverage,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. The Covid pandemic has spurred the need for greater access to a comprehensive healthcare benefit than only traditional hospital expenses. InsureMyTeam says it posted $16,000 in revenue and grew at 38% month-over-month over the past 5 months. The founders’ experience in insurance, healthcare, and fintech sectors could prove helpful to operate the insurtech startup. 2020 in Bengaluru, India 14 A platform that provides cross-border payments and compliance for small and medium-size businesses. The company offers banking, document management and workflow automation to companies that handle international transactions. SALT has raised a $500,000 seed round last October, as . “SALT is a neo banking solution stitched together to ease payments and documentation which comes with business banking by moving it to a digital-first and automated end to end platform,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. As India’s exports for the first time for fiscal year of 2022, more robust cross-border banking and compliance service providers for businesses will be needed. SALT could be one of the companies that make the international transaction easier. 2021 in Bengaluru, India 10 RecordBook, a mobile and SaaS-based application, enables small and medium corporations to digitize all business data and workflows. “RecordBook is one stop solution to manage all business data, workflows and teams for small and medium businesses on their mobile devices and in their local languages,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. 2020 in Bengaluru, India 6 The company enables low-income persons in India to get credit via consumer-facing apps. BharatX has raised a $250,000 pre-seed round last year, per “We operate our Buy Now Pay Later (BNPL) in a white-labelled manner on other apps and websites,” the company said on Y Combinator’s blog. This fintech startup wants to capture a niche market the banks couldn’t provide– access to credit to every lower-income Indian with a zero-document flow. BharatX keeps expanding its service to pay later for food delivery and ride-hailing apps. 2020 in Pune, India 9 The company is building an AI SaaS platform that offers web-based medical annotation tools for 2D and 3D data. RedBrick AI’s tool, which automates up to 80% of iterative manual labeling, enables easy work for its customers and external labelers. Medical image annotation is the process of labeling medical imaging data, including X-Ray, CT, MRI scans, or ultrasound. “The RedBrick configurable workflow system helps teams build robust and scalable quality assurance processes. RedBrick AI offers a suite of APIs to help developers consume the annotations being created, and integrate with MLOps,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. Artificial intelligence (AI) can analyze a large amount of data in images stored by healthcare organizations. Health professionals will be able to save time, make better-informed decisions, and avoid potential errors through Redbrick AI’s tool. 2020 in Bengaluru, India 7 A neo-banking platform for children in India. It provides a pre-paid card linked to its app with unique safety controls. The users can transact using the Streak card and earn coins for rewards. “At Streak, we are building a new age personalized & gamified banking solution for teenagers,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. This startup sounds like another edu-fintech startup for teens in the batch (see Yodaa at the very bottom) to help young adults save money and get smart with money. 2021 in Bengaluru, India 10 The company is building a reverse ETL platform that synchronizes data from customers’ cloud data warehouses to business apps like Salesforce, HubSpot and Google Ads. “Castled helps organizations sync customer and product data in real-time from cloud data warehouses like Snowflake, Redshift, BigQuery, Postgres to their sales, marketing and support tools like Salesforce, Hubspot, Google Ads, Mixpanel, Intercome and lots more,” the company said. 2019 in Gurugram, India 45 A platform that enables retail chains to open their offline stores at a click of a button. The company says it has built more than 300 stores in the past 9 months for brands like Bridgestone, Westside, Oyo, and Chai point using its AI-powered project planning software and a managed marketplace of contractors in India. “India is massively building its retail infra in Tier2/3 towns,” co-founder and CEO Amit Bansal The Economic Times. “From conceptualization to completion, we offer brands hassle-free turnkey retail fit-out solutions.” 91Squarefeet claims it is growing more than 20% month-on-month despite the covid pandemic that accelerates consumers’ shift to online channels. According to The Economic Times, retailers and quick-service restaurant chains opened four new stores in India almost every day last year. With Covid restrictions easing in India, it is expected that more companies might have plans to open their offline offices and use 91Squarefeet’s platform. 2021 in Bengaluru, India 10 Shopr.tv, a live commerce platform, is Twitch for fashion and beauty, where creators can broadcast, build an audience, and monetize by selling over live streams. The startup says it has a strong partner pipeline, with over 70 creators and 12 brands whose products these creators can sell. We are Twitch for Fashion and Beauty, where creators can broadcast, build an audience, and monetize by selling over live streams,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. The experienced co-founders are targeting a huge market, one that brings together live-streaming, e-commerce, and social networking. Shopr.tv claims that the slice of the beauty and fashion industry that it’s targeting is valued at $24 billion (which seems low, actually), and has 150 million consumers. Meanwhile, the young startup plans to make money by taking a 10-12% cut on every sale. Image: Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch 2020 in Chennai, India 15 A no-code software-as-a-service (SaaS) platform that enables businesses build custom templates to streamline their interactions with the field force like merchandisers and sales. “Our no-code application allows organizations to build internal mobile applications to manage field teams of any size,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. 2022 in Bengaluru, India 3 NinjaStudy is building an AI-driven English-speaking tutor app that helps English learners across the globe practice and learn English speaking with feedback on users’ grammar, pronunciation and fluency. “You can imagine this as Siri/Alexa for learning and practicing English speaking,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. NinjaStudy says it enables non-native English speakers to learn and practice English. They can use the app as if they are talking to Alex or Siri; an AI tutor will then correct users’ grammar, pronunciation, etc. Based on its website, NinjaStudy seems still to be working on its beta app, which is aimed at adults. When it’s out, we’d like to see whether it indeed offers unique features compared with its peers. 2021 in Mumbai, India 11 Vance says it is a pipe.com of India. Its platform is aimed at helping startups transform recurring revenue into upfront capital for growth without debt or dilution. “We help companies unlock their recurring revenue upfront. This gives them the boost to grow without dilution, warrants and hassle.” Investors love this model. Just look at rival Pipe, which reached last May after raising $250 million. Notably, Pipe just launched in 2020. 2021 in Mumbai, India 5 A bond trading platform for India’s financial institutions and asset managers in India. “We are building the infrastructure to digitize bond markets and make bond trading more efficient,” the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. 2021 in Bengaluru, India 24 A home diagnostic fertility platform to help people suffering from infertility and sexual disorders. “At Janani, we got to the root cause of the problem through our proprietary diagnostic and treatment plans created with the help of expert doctors,” Nilay Mehrotra co-founder said in an interview with . Janani, which launched four months ago starting with at-home semen diagnostic, already generates about $8,000 revenue per month, growing 50% every month, the company wrote on Y Combinator’s blog. Janani makes $60 per customer, targeting 130 million infertile Indians. The global fertility treatment market is expected to in 2025 from $15.74 billion in 2021. Janani recently has raised $2.2 million from investors, including Y Combinator, Olive Tree Capital, and Goodwater Capital, as per . / Getty Images 2022 in Delhi, India 2 A platform allows fintech companies to embed DeFi products on their platform through a single API. “We abstract away all the complexities of crypto. Our APIs are designed to be integrated in under 1 hour. We handle accounts and ledgering, so you [users] can focus on building a rich UX for your customers,” the company said on its website. 2021 in Bengaluru, India 5 A money app that empowers teens to spend, manage expenses, earn virtual Yo coins, access curated content on personal finance. The Yodaa app also offers fun quizzes for the teens. Parents are invited to get their own virtual Yodda cards, transfer monthly allowances digitally and help their teen’s growing personal savings. “With Yodaa, our customers get access to a prepaid card and a smart money app. Using Yodaa they can make payments, save money, split bills, get credit, invest and learn about wealth creation,” the company said on Y Combinator’s blog. As mentioned above, Yodaa sounds like a direct competitor to Streak, which was founded a year earlier than Yodaa. The startup also lets teens learn about managing their money from the early years. |
Tech CEOs to face faster criminal liability under UK online safety law | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | The U.K. is speeding up the application of powers that could see tech CEOs sent to prison if their businesses fail to comply with incoming safety-focused internet content legislation, the government confirmed today. The latest revisions to the draft legislation include a radically reduced time frame for being able to apply criminal liability powers against senior tech execs who fail to cooperate with information requests from the regulator — down to just two months after the legislation gets passed. (And since the government enjoys a large majority in the House of Commons, the incoming Online Safety regulation — already — could become law this year.) While the draft bill, which was published in , has already seen a string of revisions — with more being announced today — the core plan has remained fairly constant: The government is introducing a dedicated framework to control how social media companies and other content-focused platforms must respond to certain types of problematic content (not only illegal content), which will include a regime of Codes of Practice overseen by the media and communications regulator, Ofcom, in a vastly expanded role, and hefty powers to fine rule-breakers up to 10% of their global annual turnover. As the bill’s name suggests, the government’s focus is on a very broad “de-risking” of internet platforms — which means the bill aims to tackle not just explicitly illegal stuff (such as terrorism or child sexual abuse material, or CSAM) but aims to set rules for how the largest internet platforms need to approach “legal but harmful” online content, such as trolling. Child safety campaigners especially have been pressing for years for tech firms to be forced to purge toxic content. The government gradually and then quickly embraced this populist cause, saying its stated aim for the bill is to make the U.K. the safest place in the world to go online, loudly banging a child-protection drum. But it has also conceded that there are huge challenges to effective regulation of such a sprawling arena. The revised draft bill will be introduced in parliament Thursday — kicking off a wider, cross-party debate of what remains a controversial yet populist plan to introduce a “duty of care” on social media companies and other user-generated-content-carrying platforms. The plan enjoys broad (but not universal) support among U.K. lawmakers. The revised bill ( ) has now been published — and can be downloaded from the government’s . Commenting on the introduction of the bill to parliament in a statement, Digital Secretary Nadine Dorries said: “The internet has transformed our lives for the better. It’s connected us and empowered us. But on the other side, tech firms haven’t been held to account when harm, abuse and criminal behaviour have run riot on their platforms. Instead they have been left to mark their own homework. “We don’t give it a second’s thought when we buckle our seat belts to protect ourselves when driving. Given all the risks online, it’s only sensible we ensure similar basic protections for the digital age. If we fail to act, we risk sacrificing the well-being and innocence of countless generations of children to the power of unchecked algorithms. “Since taking on the job I have listened to people in politics, wider society and industry and strengthened the bill, so that we can achieve our central aim: to make the U.K. the safest place to go online.” It’s fair to say there is broad backing inside the U.K. parliament for cracking the whip over tech platforms when it comes to content rules (MPs surely haven’t forgotten ). There is, however, a diversity of opinion and dispute on the detail of how best to do that. So it will be interesting to see how parliamentarians respond to the draft as it goes through the legislative scrutiny process in the coming months. Much of the U.K.’s Online Safety proposal still remains unclear, though — not least how well (or poorly) the regime will work in practice and what its multifaceted requirements will mean for in-scope digital businesses, large and small. The detail of what exactly will fall into the fuzzier “legal but harmful” content bucket, for example, will be set out in secondary legislation to be agreed by MPs — the latter being another new stipulation the government announced today, arguing this will avoid the risk of tech giants becoming de facto speech police, which was one early criticism of the plan. In what looks like a bid to play down further potential for controversy, the government’s couches the aims of the bill in very vanilla terms — saying it’s is intended to ensure platforms “uphold their stated terms and conditions” as well as arguing these are merely “balanced and proportionate” measures that will finally force tech giants to take notice and effectively tackle illegal and abusive speech. (Or, else, well, their CEOs might find themselves behind bars.) Unsurprisingly, digital rights groups have been quick to seize on this implicitly contradictory messaging — reiterating warnings that the legislation represents a massively chilling attack on freedom of expression. The Open Rights Group (ORG) wasted no time in likening the threat of prison for social media execs to powers being exercised by Vladimir Putin in Russia. “Powers to imprison social media executives should be compared with Putin’s similar threats a matter of weeks ago,” ORG’s executive director, Jim Killock, said in a statement responding to the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport’s latest revisions. “The fact that the bill keeps changing its content after four years of debate should tell everyone that it is a mess, and likely to be a bitter disappointment in practice,” he added. “The bill still contains powers for ministers to decide what legal content platforms must try to remove. Parliamentary rubber stamps for ministerial say-so’s will still compromise the independence of the regulator. It would mean state-sanctioned censorship of legal content.” The government’s response to criticism of the potential impact on freedom of speech includes touting requirements in the bill for social media firms to “protect journalism” and “democratic political debate,” as its press release puts it — although it’s less clear how (or whether) platforms will/can actually do that. Instead, DCMS reiterates that “news content” has been given a carve out — emphasizing that this particular definition-stretching category is “completely exempt from any regulation under the bill.” It’s easy to see how “compliance” already sounds awfully messy — does that cover anyone online who to be a journalist? A line in DCMS’ press release appears to concede at least one looming mess — and/or the need for even more revisions/measures to be added — noting: “Ministers will also continue to consider how to ensure platforms do not remove content from recognised media outlets.” On the headline-grabbing criminal liability risk for senior tech execs — likely a populist measure that the government hopes will drum up public support to drown out objecting expert voices like ORG’s — Dorries had already signaled during parliamentary committee hearings that she wanted to accelerate the application of criminal liability powers. (Memorably, she wasted no time brandishing the threat of faster jail time at Meta’s senior execs — saying they should focus on safety and forget about the metaverse.) The original draft of the bill, which predated Dorries’ tenure heading up the digital brief, had deferred the power for at least two years. But that time frame was criticized by child safety campaigners — who warned that unless the law has real teeth it would be ineffective as platforms will just be able to ignore it. (A pressing risk of jail time for senior tech executives, such as Meta’s Nick Clegg, a former deputy prime minister of the U.K., could certainly concentrate certain C-suite minds on compliance.) The speedier jail time power is by no means the first substantial revision of the draft bill. As Killock points out, there has been a whole banquet of “revisions” at this point — manifested, in recent weeks, by DCMS putting out a running drip-feed of announcements that it’s further expanding the scope of the bill and amping up its power. This has included bringing and (in the latter case to force them to use age verification technologies); expanding added to the face of the bill introducing new criminal offenses, including ; and setting out measures to by leaning on platforms to squeeze freedom of reach. Two parliamentary committees that scrutinized the original proposal last year went on to warn of major flaws — and urged a series of changes — recommendations that DCMS ] said it considered in making these revisions. There are even more extras today, including making DCMS notes that it’s breaching these offenses that could lead senior execs of major platforms to be sentenced to up to two years in prison or fined. Another addition, related to what the government describes as “proactive technology” — tools for content moderation, user profiling and behavior identification intended to “protect users” — would “Companies will need to demonstrate they are using the right tools to address harms, they are transparent, and any technologies they develop meet standards of accuracy and effectiveness required by the regulator,” it adds, also stipulating that Ofcom will not be able to recommend these tools are applied on private messaging or legal but harmful content. Platforms will also now be required to report CSAM content they detect on their platforms directly to the National Crime Agency, in another change that replaces an existing voluntary reporting regime and that DCMS said “reflects the government’s commitment to tackling this horrific crime.” “Reports to the National Crime Agency will need to meet a set of clear standards to ensure law enforcement receives the high-quality information it needs to safeguard children, pursue offenders and limit lifelong re-victimization by preventing the ongoing recirculation of illegal content,” it specified. “In-scope companies will need to demonstrate existing reporting obligations outside of the U.K. to be exempt from this requirement, which will avoid duplication of company’s efforts.” Having made so many revisions to what the government likes to brand “world-leading” legislation, even before formal parliamentary debate kicks off, suggests accusations that the proposal is both overblown and half-baked look hard to shake. MPs may also identify a lack of coherence being costumed in populist conviction and spy an opportunity to grandstand and press for their own personal pet hates to be rolled into the mix, too (as ) — with the risk that the bill ends up even more unwieldy and laden with impossible asks. |
Tortoise co-founder Dmitry Shevelenko: ‘You can’t do too many things at the same time’ | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | named after a slow reptile, Silicon Valley startup Tortoise has made some quick pivots into new business models over the past year. Co-founded in 2019 by ex-Uber executive Dmitry Shevelenko, the company began with a , one that uses remote operators to reposition shared electric scooters to locations where prospective riders are or send them back to the warehouse for a charge. In January 2021, to test three-wheeled scooters embedded with Tortoise’s repositioning software. But right before the company scored its Spin pilot, it started realizing the potential behind remote positioning and all the cameras and sensors the company had placed on scooters. With COVID-19 causing the burgeoning shared micromobility industry to take a nose dive at the same time as people, huddled indoors, began to demand quick delivery services, Shevelenko realized it “would be malpractice” not to pursue the robotic sidewalk delivery. Tortoise started delivering with , and then with big names like grocery story chain nationwide logistics company and convenience store chain . All signs were pointing to sidewalk delivery being a success. But then… In early March 2022, Tortoise pivoted again, , which are essentially fancy vending machines placed on top of Tortoise’s delivery robots and located outside retailers. Now, Tortoise has moved from a hardware-as-a-service model to a take-rate scheme that gives it 10% of any sales made from its card payment-enabled bots, whether it’s a box of pastries from a bakery or brand new headphones from an electronics store. Shevelenko, who served as Uber’s director of business development and was behind , says these pivots are just the beauty of a startup that’s responsive to market changes. The founder has advised or been on the board of a number of mobility and tech companies, including Skip, Superpedestrian, Codi, Payfare, Skyryse, SpotHero and Cargo Systems. While Tortoise is his first time starting a company, Shevelenko is well versed in the factors that can cause a startup to win and lose. We sat down with Shevelenko to talk about everything from and the future of micromobility, how to own changing business directions, the difficulties in sidewalk robot delivery and the agility of startups. For Uber, as a consumer-centric company, it’s ultimately a strategy of capturing all your transportation spend. The ultimate end state here — and this is why I think they’re putting so much money behind this Uber One subscription — is transportation-as-a-subscription product. It’s not really effective for Uber and Lyft to try to win your business one trip at a time by offering you special incentives. If people are constantly switching back and forth between Uber and Lyft, they both lose. So the way to win is not by competing on a per-trip basis, but almost on an annual basis. How can you lock somebody in to be yours for a year? I think the essential nature of that consumer lock-in means you need to have more than just rideshare, right? I think in rideshare, bundling is essential, because rideshare will have ups and downs. But the demand for transportation is constant. So if you have multiple modes, you’re always going to be doing well. Oh, absolutely. It’s just purely a function of sequencing and relative prioritization. The only reason delivery got so good, and there’s so much demand for it is because of COVID, too, right? It’s not only shared scooters that became bad. |
Ukraine’s president signs law to legalize crypto as digital donations roll in | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | A month ago, Ukraine’s parliament passed a bill to legalize cryptocurrency, preparing a framework for the regulation and management of cryptocurrencies like Bitcoin and Ethereum. Today, the country’s president, Volodymyr Zelenskyy, signed into law that bill, “On Virtual Assets,” which establishes a legal framework for the country to operate a regulated crypto market. “The Parliament has adopted a law on virtual assets. I think the president is about to sign it into law in a matter of days. So we strive to be as friendly to virtual assets as possible. And we are continuing this effort during wartime as well,” Ukraine’s vice prime minister and minister of Digital Transformation, Mykhailo Fedorov, told TechCrunch in . According to reports coming out of , and other digital asset-focused outlets, crypto exchanges and firms handling digital assets will now be required to register with the government to operate legally in Ukraine, and banks will be allowed to open accounts for crypto firms. The law also reportedly empowers Ukraine’s National Securities and Stock Market Commission with the ability to determine the country’s policies on digital assets, issue licenses to businesses dealing with crypto, and act as a financial watchdog. (Indeed, Ukraine’s parliament previously passed a law legalizing cryptocurrency back in September, but President Zelenskyy soon afterward, saying the country couldn’t afford to stand up a new regulatory body for managing crypto.) The law “on virtual assets” was signed today! Now crypto is legalized in Ukraine. Thank you, President @Zelenskyy for the support. We believe that crypto industry offers new economic opportunities. We will do our best to bring the bright new future closer as soon as possible. — Alex Bornyakov (@abornyakov)
If you thought crypto was legal in Ukraine, you have plenty of company. Even without formal regulation, Ukrainians, Russians and Venezuelans (in that order) had become among the active retail users of digital currencies by the fall of 2020, according to blockchain analysis outfit Chainalysis. At the time, Chainalysis’s head of research a few trends were driving Ukraine’s rise to the top, including a “really tech-native population” and an “industrious startup environment.” (Coindesk also noted that there is also more cybercrime activity in Eastern Europe than in other regions, which likely also played a role in driving so much trading volume.) The types of regulations that were just passed into law have taken on new urgency, with Ukraine receiving tens of millions of dollars’ worth of crypto donations in the weeks since Russia invaded the country and began killing soldiers and civilians alike, prompting an estimated 3 million people to flee the country of 42 million. (NPR just likened the number of Ukrainian refugees who have fled to Poland alone — roughly 1.8 million — to the .) With the new law in place, Ukraine’s first crypto exchange, Kuna, will no longer be limited to helping the country spend the donations directly with crypto-friendly suppliers but to convert crypto to much-needed fiat. In the meantime, the country has also partnered with the Bahamas-based exchange giant FTX to convert crypto contributions to aid Ukraine’s war effort into fiat for deposit at the National Bank of Ukraine. More specifically, as on Monday by Coindesk, FTX and Kuna and a staking platform called Everstake have partnered with Ukrainian government officials to launch a donation website for users called Crypto donations have been key when it comes to raising funds from all around the world. “We have been able to raise $55 million. And all of that has been directed toward the needs of the Ukrainian army,” Fedorov told TechCrunch on Tuesday. Certainly, none of this is happening the way that Ukrainian officials expected just a few short months ago, when the country was in The New York Times under the headline, “The Crypto Capital of the World.” “The big idea is to become one of the top jurisdictions in the world for crypto companies,” Alex Bornyakov, deputy minister at Ukraine’s years-old Ministry of Digital Transformation, told the outlet for that story in November, before the unimaginable happened. “We believe this is the new economy, this is the future, and we believe this is something that is going to boost our economy.” |
Daily Crunch: B2B marketplace Sokowatch raises $125M Series B, rebrands as ‘Wasoko’ | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Wednesday, March 16, 2022! Oh boy do we have a lot coming down the pike. Our Austin City Spotlight event ! We are ! And the Early Stage event ! – Tiger is investing in Africa, , digging into the hyper-active capital disburser’s 2021 results. The group made five investments in Africa last year out of more than 300. A good question is whether that ratio will rise in 2022, and, if so, how much? (And speaking of Tiger, earlier this week!) Yesterday, TechCrunch noted that Chinese tech stocks had taken a lengthy hammering, leading to their valuations falling sharply. ? Well, we got a little hint of that in early Q1 2022 venture capital data from China. But today, the country . Is the move too late? |
Meta takes down deepfake of Ukraine’s President Zelensky surrendering | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Meta removed an altered video falsely depicting Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky ordering troops to surrender Wednesday. The video is the latest alarming milestone in the parallel information war accompanying Russia’s brutal invasion of neighboring Ukraine, but it was a moment that Ukraine’s government and social media companies appear to have been prepared for. Meta Head of Security Policy Nathaniel Gleicher explained that the company removed the content for breaking its rules against “manipulated media,” a form of multimedia misinformation that often manifests as video edited to depict a public figure saying something that they never actually said. 3/ More about our policy against manipulated media in our community standards: — Nathaniel Gleicher (@ngleicher) The misleading video was intercepted by Meta fairly quickly, but is apparently circulating widely on Facebook’s Russian counterpart VKontakte, according to the . DFRLab also observed that a pro-Russia Telegram channel published a deepfake Wednesday depicting Zelensky calling on the country to surrender. National TV network Ukraine 24 also reported that its news ticker was hacked on Wednesday to similar ends. The ticker showed a message purportedly from Zelensky calling on the people of Ukraine to end their resistance against Russian invading forces. ❗️ Russian hybrid warfare in action. Ukraine 24 TV channel was hacked: the news ticker started displaying President Zelenskyy's fake "capitulation" address. has already refuted the fake, stating the only people he can offer to lay down arms is the Russian troops. — Stratcom Centre UA (@StratcomCentre) Ukraine’s president was with his own messaging on Telegram, shot in the same selfie video style that’s characterized Zelensky’s communications since the beginning of the invasion. In early March, Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communications that Russia might deploy altered videos to distort public perception of its invasion. The center, part of the Ukrainian government’s Ministry of Culture and Information Policy, focuses on “[countering] external threats, in particular information attacks of the Russian Federation.” “Imagine seeing Vladimir Zelensky on TV making a surrender statement,” the center wrote on its Facebook page on March 2. “You see it, you hear it – so it’s true. But this is not the truth… Be aware – this is a fake!” |
Google I/O returns May 11 and 12, with limited in-person attendance | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Feel that? The weather’s warming up, it’s staying light outside later and there’s something [long, extended inhale] developery in the air. New clues from Google dropped this morning, in the lead up to Google’s annual developer conference. The company has since confirmed that the show will go on, May 11 and 12. We'll be back live from Shoreline Amphitheatre for this year's ! Join us online May 11-12 — Sundar Pichai (@sundarpichai) Traditionally held at the Shoreline Amphitheater in Mountain View, California, Google skipped the show altogether in 2020, out of concern over the then still-new COVID-19 pandemic. Last year, it joined the rest of the tech world in going all digital. The company is returning to the concert venue, with a “limited live audience.” Once again, the show will feature a free virtual streaming element for everyone who can’t make it. Can you untangle this string? Keep an eye on this thread for more clues. ↓ — Google Developers (@googledevs) Like Apple’s WWDC, the show is developer-focused, while also front-loaded with consumer content during kick-off. Updates to Android, Wear OS and various Google services are a near-lock. Hardware has traditionally been a bit more of a crapshoot. Some years have seen no devices, while others have brought addition to the Nest and Pixel lines. The show has also contained its share of surprises, including the announcement — and subsequent first live demo — of the company’s AI booking service, Duplex. |
BMW’s CTO on electrification and supply chain issues | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | As BMW gets ready to debut the next generation of its 7 Series luxury sedan in April — and with that, the new all-electric i7 — the company today turned the spotlight on its overall portfolio of electric cars, including the upcoming iX1, an electrified version of its popular small crossover SUV. These will join the company’s technology flagship iX and the sporty i4, which it announced last year. This, of course, is all happening against the backdrop of the global chip shortage and overall supply chain crisis, as well as now the war in Ukraine. In a press briefing earlier today, BMW CTO Frank Weber noted that production of the i4 will start in the middle of the year, but for now, that’s really all we know. As for the i7, the company showed a few teasers at its annual conference this morning, mostly highlighting the car’s new (and large) kidney grille, which will surely get the BMW fans talking. For the i7, BMW promises up to 305 miles of EPA electric range, which is in line with everybody’s expectations. But as its flagship sedan, the 7 Series and especially the i7 are also where the company will debut a lot of new tech. “The 7 Series is not just a product for us. The 7 Series is a collection of our capabilities. It is what we are really able to do. The i7 is not only the most powerful electric vehicle we will do, it has a cinema experience in the second row, the doors will open automatically and close automatically — and it has a long, long list of things. It has art mode, so it has real digital art inside,” Weber said — and he himself had to laugh a bit about the extravagance of it all. BMW But these vehicles, of course, are increasingly complex in terms of the tech inside them and, as such, BMW (and everybody else in the business) has been affected by the chip supply crisis. That meant the company had to putting touchscreens into some of its cars for a while last year, for example. Weber noted that the chip crisis hasn’t changed the company’s overall EV expansion plans. “It takes us a lot of energy to cope with the challenges of the chip crisis,” he said in today’s meeting. “We are really proud of — as a team — when you see how we deal with a chip crisis, our production systems and our supply chain systems are really flexible and we can react very quickly. This gave us a competitive edge last year. We believe this will also give us a competitive edge this year, but we expect that this will continue for the whole year.” He noted that the company initially thought the supply chain would recover by the second half of 2022, but BMW now believes this will continue throughout the year. “Like we dealt with it last year, we will deal with it this year. We have not changed any introduction dates, we have not changed any volume assumptions, assumptions on the birth or rollout because of a chip shortage,” Weber said. Likewise, he does not expect the war in Ukraine to affect BMW in the long run. But Weber also noted that the company gets its wiring harnesses from Ukraine, just as a number of its competitors, mostly for the engine and transmission. Weber noted that this industry employs around 20,000 people in Ukraine, mostly in the western part of the country. “We don’t just want to take away the work there. We have duplicated machines in order to help us now to build up those wiring harnesses,” he said, and added that, while there are only a few BMW engines that completely rely on wiring harnesses currently built in Ukraine, by next week, the company will be able to resume normal production again. Weber also highlighted the company’s recent , the company’s software arm for the mobility space. This partnership is less about the chip shortage, but it does give BMW more say in the tech stack for its autonomous driving systems and its infotainment offerings. Weber also noted that this partnership is an example of his company thinking about its supply chain in a more global fashion these days. “This is a global economy, whether we like it or not. Regional solutions and not leveraging what’s available globally would be such a setback for how we are used to doing exceptional products, I can almost not imagine going back there. We are connected. And actually, I can only hope that we can go back to some of this and not that, after this has been resolved, everybody thinks we have to solve problems within each region. It will simply not work.” As for the overall move to electric vehicles, Weber was clear that BMW is not setting an end date for combustion engines. Before even contemplating that, he argued, the charging infrastructure has to be in place, together with the green electricity infrastructure to charge these cars and a robust flow of raw materials to build batteries. BMW wants to ramp down combustion engine technology and ramp up battery electric vehicles. “The last thing we want is — maybe because it seems to be politically appropriate — just to cut off things will not work. You have to make sure that this ramp down and ramp up go hand-in-hand and go smoothly. Those are bigger industrial processes and this is not just about single vehicles,” Weber said. He also seemed somewhat bullish about hydrogen, but for heavy trucks more so than for personal vehicles, mostly because of the weight it would take to put batteries into a truck with enough range. |
Bored Apes NFT project gets official ‘ApeCoin’ token | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Even among the fastest-growing crypto startups, has had a particularly explosive year. The startup is behind the NFT project Bored Apes Yacht Club (BAYC), which only launched in April of last year but has quickly grown to become the most valuable NFT project by market cap. The price of admission to purchase the cheapest of the 10,000 images currently sits at around $240,000 worth of the Ethereum cryptocurrency. As the startup looks to bank funding at a $5 billion valuation (a spokesperson for the company declined to comment on that figure), Yuga Labs is looking toward the future, detailing a new partnership for a play-to-earn gaming title built around a much-hyped token called . Multimillion dollar monkey pictures and monkey money are likely not the future you were expecting to capture the undivided attention of Silicon Valley VCs, but Yuga Labs hopes that the new game and token will inspire a mainstream crypto economy built around their their IP, which further expanded last week to include the highly valued CryptoPunks and Meebits NFT collections after Yuga acquired the assets from Larva Labs. Building up this economy will require some very particular legal maneuverings to ensure regulatory compliance. The SEC has largely been keeping its distance from NFT projects — — but crypto startups selling tokens that act as unregistered securities has been an area where they’ve been more vigilant in cracking down. As a result, Yuga Labs is being very careful to isolate itself publicly from the token’s launch, which will instead be released by an entity called ApeCoin DAO made up of council members that are connected to the NFT project, but none of which are employees or executives at Yuga Labs. An organization called the APE Foundation will also be formed to administer the decisions of the ApeCoin DAO. Furthermore, the DAO will carry official branding of the BAYC project, which Yuga Labs is “gifting” to it by way of a 1/1 NFT of a blue Bored Apes logo. If this all sounds a little convoluted, welcome to crypto in 2022. ApeCoin DAO’s council members include Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian, FTX’s Amy Wu, Sound Ventures’ Maaria Bajwa, Animoca’s Yat Siu and Horizen Labs’ Dean Steinbeck. Token holders will be able to vote on decisions in the DAO, while the special council “will carry out the decisions of the community,” a spokesperson says. Though Yuga won’t officially be launching the Ethereum-based token, the startup and the BAYC project founders will be the owners of nearly a quarter of the total token supply while owners of Bored Apes and Mutant Apes NFTs will collectively receive 15% of the total token allocation. A spokesperson for Yuga Labs notes that they expect the Ape token to begin trading “soon” on major exchanges including Coinbase, FTX, eToro, Kraken, OKX, Gemini, FTX, Binance and Binance US. The startup did not make any executives available for interview and declined to offer further details on the relationship between the ApeCoin DAO and Yuga Labs. BAYC In terms of what the token will actually do, the full scope is currently unclear, but it is apparent that ApeCoin will be used as in-game currency for some titles that Yuga Labs has in the works, including a previously unannounced title being developed with San Francisco-based game studio nWay. The developer has previously published a number of battle games licensing IP from entities including Power Rangers and the WWE. That unnamed title will utilize a crypto gaming mechanic called play-to-earn that enables users to earn tokens based on the amount of time and effort they put into playing the title. The mechanic was partially popularized in the game Axie Infinity, which has done several billion dollars in transactions over the past year and led its parent company Sky Mavis to raise at a $3 billion valuation. Yuga Labs says that the new title will be released this year. This title will interestingly be in addition to a play-to-earn gaming title that will be released in partnership with Animoca Brands. The company also notes that ApeCoin will have utility in an existing Animoca title called Benji Bananas. A report in yesterday detailed that the company is also planning a separate gaming title called MetaRPG, which will be compatible with a number of NFT projects, and further plans to branch into virtual land sales this year, efforts which Yuga estimates will push the company to a projected $455 million in net revenue this year. Yuga Labs declined to comment on the report. NFTs have had a blockbuster year and are already finding support from major tech companies. Twitter has launched limited support for NFT profile pictures, Facebook has recently indicated plans to integrate NFTs into Instagram and Stripe just launched crypto support for NFTs. NFTs have also inspired a spirited backlash among consumers, particularly gamers, who worry that NFTs won’t actually democratize ownership of games and will instead supercharge micro-transactions. Others have expressed concerns around the environmental effects of minting NFTs on energy-intensive blockchains. Yuga’s foray into gaming is clearly a major element of its growth plans for the BAYC brand, but blockchain gaming is still a decidedly niche affair and one it hopes to open up. “I don’t know how big Bored Ape Yacht Club can be, that’s not to say that I don’t imagine it to be big, but I think — I hope — Yuga will be big and that we will be able to create lots of things that are unique and special and speak to the greater community in different ways,” Yuga CEO Nicole Muniz said in an last month with the D3 Network. |
null | Michael Redd | 2,022 | 3 | 29 | null |
Fly away, little sensors! These tiny wireless devices can be scattered by the wind | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | If you want to monitor the temperature, humidity and exposure over 100 square miles of forest, you’re going to spend a lot of time tying tech trees. But what if you could scatter your sensors the same way dandelions and elms scatter their seeds? UW researchers have . The project pushes the boundaries of small-scale and purpose-built computing, and while it’s still very much a prototype, it’s an interesting direction for embedded electronics to take. “Our prototype suggests that you could use a drone to release thousands of these devices in a single drop. They’ll all be carried by the wind a little differently, and basically you can create a 1,000-device network with this one drop,” said Shyam Gollakota, a UW professor and prolific device creator. It’s made possible primarily by the removal of any sort of battery, which lowers the mass of the electronics considerably. Equipped with only a few tiny sensors, a wireless transceiver and a couple tiny solar cells, the gadget itself weighs less than 30 milligrams. Its wind-catching structure was arrived at after dozens of attempts, ultimately arriving at this bike wheel shape as one that both caused the device to travel far from its starting point but also land with the solar panels facing upward 95% of the time. When scattered by drone, they can travel some 100 meters before settling down. Once they land, they will operate whenever it’s light, using radio-frequency backscatter to bounce their signals off the environment and to each other, forming an ad hoc network that can be collected by a control device. It’s nowhere near the mobility of the miraculously light dandelion seed, which weighs a single milligram and can travel for miles. But nature has had eons to perfect its designs, while the team at UW just started recently. The other challenge is, of course, the fact that real seeds eventually either turn into dandelions or decay into nothing — while a thousand sensors would remain until picked up or broken to pieces. The team said they’re working on that, though the field of biodegradable electronics is still young. If they can figure out the e-waste angle (and probably the animals eating them angle), this could be very helpful for people trying to keep a close eye on threatened ecosystems. “This is just the first step, which is why it’s so exciting. There are so many other directions we can take now,” said lead author Vikram Iyer. The paper describing their work . |
The VC-backed chicken that’s changing the way farmers breed and feed their livestock | Maggie Stamets | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Most people don’t spend much time thinking about where their poultry comes from, much less what it was eating when it was alive but the feeding practices on large farms are harmful to the environment and have led to bland, unhealthy chickens. Today’s guest, Matthew Wadiak is a chef and founder and CEO of Cooks Venture, which is on a mission to create a new breed of broiler chicken that is more active, able to eat a varied diet and tastier. Through restorative agriculture and selective breeding, the Cooks Venture farm in Arkansas has bred chickens that are more heat resistant and can eat a variety of grains. As a chef and former co-founder of Blue Apron, Wadiak views it as his duty to try to change the food system for the better. about planting 20,000 Hazelnut trees in partnership with RAD. Don’t miss the next live episode with Shivani Siroya from Tala on 3/17 at 10 p.m. PDT/ 1 p.m. EDT. RSVP: and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of FOUND. Connect with us: |
Netflix tests a new feature that will raise prices for account sharing | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Netflix will begin testing a new, opt-in feature that will prompt subscribers to pay extra if sharing the service with people outside their own household. The feature will allow households to add up to two “sub accounts” for a fee that’s less than the cost of the full-priced Netflix service. The new option will initially be tested in Chile, Costa Rica and Peru and will roll out over the next few weeks to those markets. The company didn’t say if or when the feature would be rolled out to global subscribers. At launch, Netflix’s Standard and Premium subscribers in the test markets will be offered the option to add sub accounts to their service for people they don’t live with. Each sub account will have its own profile and personalized recommendations, as usual. But what makes this feature different is that the sub accounts willl also have their own Netflix login and password. Plus, if they ever choose to set up their own Netflix service under their name and billing information, their viewing history, watch list (“My List”), and personalized recommendations will transfer over. To make this feature work, Netflix isn’t relying on location-based data, like GPS. Instead, the company is leveraging the same information it uses to provide its service today to its end users, including an IP address, device IDs and other information about devices signed into the Netflix account across the household. Using this information, Netflix can identify when there’s persistent sharing taking place outside a household. To enable the new sub accounts, the main account owner will receive an email with a code that they’ll need to use to verify the additional devices are a part of their household. The cost for the extra non-household members in the test markets is 2,380 CLP in Chile, $2.99 USD in Costa Rica and 7.9 PEN in Peru. This is less expensive than a full Netflix account plan, but it’s also more than it previously cost to share someone’s Netflix account for free. Netflix notes the extra members won’t be paying for their account separately — the Netflix bill still goes to the main account holder. (If that person wants to charge their extra members for the new fees, that’s up to them to handle and collect.) In earlier years, Netflix had largely turned a blind eye to the common practice of users sharing their Netflix accounts with other friends and family outside their immediate household. In fact, Netflix’s then-CEO Reed Hastings had once as it represented a chance for new people to discover what the service had to offer. But today, Netflix doesn’t have as much to prove — many of its shows, like “Stranger Things” or “Squid Game,” have become global entertainment sensations. Meanwhile, its real challenge is continuing to grow subscribers and revenues in the face of increased competition. The streamer’s year-end quarter, for instance, was , having seen its lowest subscriber growth in years. In theory, creating an avenue for extra members to move along the path to becoming full subscribers through the new transfer option could help boost Netflix’s paying user base over time. In the near term, however, it’s worth noting that the extra members will not be counted as subscribers while still using someone else’s account. Though Netflix had been happy to embrace account-sharing in the past, its position today differs. Netflix’s current terms of service state that sharing is something that should take place within a household and not between households. The company also tested a feature last March that , signaling perhaps a wider crackdown was in store. Netflix, however, doesn’t see this new test as a crackdown, we understand — just an option it wants to try out to see if it makes sense for members. It’s possible that user backlash could see the company shelving the idea to try something else instead. Or Netflix may decide to roll it out more broadly, if members adopt the feature. Time will tell. “We recognize that people have many entertainment choices, so we want to ensure any new features are flexible and useful for members, whose subscriptions fund all our great TV and films,” wrote Chengyi Long, Netflix’s director of Product Innovation, in . “We’ll be working to understand the utility of these two features for members in these three countries before making changes anywhere else in the world,” Long added. |
Twitter’s spin on the close friends story might be on its way soon | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Sometimes you just want to tweet your reactions to the “Love is Blind” reunion without bothering your 4,333 closest friends, who probably follow you because they work in tech, and not because they care that you think that Shake is the most infuriating reality TV villain of all time. Or maybe that’s just me. Since last year, Twitter has been that would allow users to to their tweets, letting them post to only a small subset of their followers. Similar to an Instagram close friends story or Google Plus Circles ( ), Twitter is also calling this product Circle. Twitter Circle has been leaked by researchers already (h/t ), but we haven't seen it live yet. I got these pop-ups earlier, but couldn't click past "got it" on the second screen — I asked Twitter about it and they said it's probably a bug! So… coming soon maybe? — amanda silberling (@asilbwrites) This morning, we encountered a pop-up on Twitter prompting us to set up our Twitter Circle to share with a “smaller crowd” of up to 150 people. The onboarding screen also indicated that circles can be changed at any time, and people won’t be notified if you remove them. These were the same screens already by app researcher Nima Owji, but when we navigated to the second screen of the onboarding process, we were unable to proceed past the “got it” button. is working on the “Twitter Circle” intro page for the web app. — Nima Owji (@nima_owji) We asked Twitter about this, and a spokesperson indicated that we likely received the pop-up as a result of a bug, so we couldn’t actually set up a Twitter Circle since the feature hasn’t rolled out. But if Twitter is working on this actively enough for an accidental bug to slip through to the real world, it might indicate that we will get our circles soon. Of course, testing a feature, or even rolling it out, doesn’t mean that it’s here forever — remember ? Already, through newer features like and the option to to your tweets, Twitter is giving users more control over who sees their tweets and who can engage with their tweets. You can even paywall your spiciest content through Super Follows. In some ways, part of the joy (and horror) of Twitter is that it’s like a public square of the internet, and introducing more of these features might make public Twitter feel like LinkedIn, where it would be weird to share your feelings about the “Love is Blind” reunion, just to throw out a random example. But users already know (or at least we think they do) that when they post, they’re making their innermost thoughts public. Historically, tweeters who have wanted to make a more private space to shout into the void have created “alt” accounts set to private, which they only share with their inner circle. So, a feature like circles would make it easier to toggle between those two audiences on just one account. Still, the Instagram close friends feature didn’t necessarily . |
Clockwork raises $21M to keep server clocks in sync | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | You’d think that synchronizing the clocks across a fleet of modern servers is a solved problem, but it’s actually quite a hard challenge to solve, especially if you want to get to nanosecond accuracy. This also means that it remains an axiom in computer science that you should never build a system based on clock time. , which is announcing a $21 million Series A funding round today, promises to change this with sync accuracy as low as 5 nanoseconds with hardware timestamps and hundreds of nanoseconds with software timestamps. Based on this work, the company is also launching its first product today, Latency Sensei, which can give its users extremely fine-grained latency data in their cloud, on-premises and hybrid environments, which they can then use to find bottlenecks and tune their networks. The company’s customers already include the likes of Nasdaq, Wells Fargo and RBC. Clockwork The startup was founded by Yilong Geng, Deepak Merugu and Stanford’s “VMware Founders Professor of Computer Science” Balaji Prabhakar, with VMware co-founder and Stanford computer science professor Mendel Rosenblum serving as board member and chief scientist. Given this group’s pedigree, it’s no surprise that the core research behind Clockwork’s system is based on fundamental academic research the team did at Stanford. The Network Time Synchronization Protocol (NTP), which is the standard format that most computers use for synching clocks today, is ubiquitous but not very accurate. There has been some work on improving that, with Facebook, for example, to the Open Compute Project last year, but the Clockwork team promises far greater accuracy. “Sometimes, inside data centers, I couldn’t get them to agree on a second. My phone and the base station here probably agree on the second. Then you get finer and finer and finer — down to the microseconds and nanoseconds. That is very hard. It’s very hard for two clocks to know exactly what nanosecond they are in,” Prabhakar explained. He noted that it’s also not good enough to synchronize these clocks once. You also have to keep them in sync. You can put high-accuracy clocks that are immune to temperature variations and vibration into a server, but that clock would quickly become more expensive than the server itself. Clockwork To solve this issue, the team built a system and machine learning model that allows it to very accurately measure the time it takes for a timestamp to arrive at a given server. That’s not so different from how NTP works, but the team then takes this a few steps further by looking at a variety of timestamps and then getting both the offset of the clock and the relative frequency difference. All of this then feeds into the machine learning model. In addition, the team also built the system so the different clocks can talk to each other and detect (and correct) when they are not synchronized. In the absence of trustworthy timestamps, distributed systems have long had to rely on clockless designs, which adds an extra level of complexity to building complex systems. The Clockwork team hopes that its work will allow researchers to experiment with new time-based algorithms across a number of problem areas like database consistency, event ordering, consensus protocols and ledgers. The original research by Rosenblum’s and Prabhakar’s team was all about what you could do if you could trust the clocks in a distributed system. “Currently, nobody uses time except for maybe Spanner at Google, CockroachDB or someone doing database things,” Rosenblum said. “We believe that there’s a lot more places, especially as more and more time-critical things came up. We can do time sync, since we figured out how to do that pretty well. And so we asked: is this part of a trend where we’re going to start programming these systems differently? And [researchers] got kind of excited about that possibility of us being able to pull this off.” So with the synchronization issues solved, the Clockwork team is now looking to build products on top of this, starting with Latency Sensei. But Prabhakar also noted that the team is already working on another project that makes it easier to detect congestion inside of data centers. TCP, he noted, is great for wide-area networks, but inside the data center, it is quite wasteful. But when you know more about the network — and its latencies — then that in turn could be used to provide the TCP protocol with better hints about how to best route packets inside the data center. The company’s Series A round was led by NEA, with participation from well-known angel investors, including MIPS co-founder John Hennessy, early Google investor Ram Shriram and Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang. |
Agolo’s summary-powered search brings in government work and fresh funding | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Search is hard, but even the decent tools developed by Google, Microsoft and others can’t seem to get it right when it comes to navigating the thousands of documents and ideas trapped in enterprise and government databases. Agolo is making a specialty of it, however, using intelligent summaries to get a foot in the door with feds — and raise a couple million to keep building, too. in the summer of 2019, or as I think of it, last summer. At the time, the company had built a powerful summary engine that could take documents, articles and other long-form content and produce shorter versions that kept the critical points intact. This type of tech is valuable in a lot of ways, but the one Agolo found most immediately applicable is in search. The problem with search is that the engines that do it are both smart and dumb. They’re smart about finding threads of relevance and ordering things using those metrics (when they’re allowed to), but dumb in that they aren’t very good at context or extraction. By that I mean that they may or may not be good at pulling out, for example, the author of a page or paper because formatting differs widely — and without the ability to connect those pieces of information these engines don’t really know what’s important. Part of summarizing a document, however, is understanding what about it is important — otherwise how do you know which parts to keep or throw away? This information, it turns out, is crucial for making searches of unstructured or miscellaneous data effective. focused on the process of turning documents into data, and Agolo is using a related approach to let users find the needle in the corporate document haystack. The company found a good fit for its technology in the early days of the pandemic, when the Office of Science and Tech Policy was looking for a better way to organize the swiftly accumulating data around COVID-19. Searching for authors and substances is all well and good, but people needed something a bit smarter than the usual database indexers. Agolo co-founder and CEO Sage Wohns gave the example of searching for ibuprofen. Any ordinary search engine only understands ibuprofen as a term people generally search for in order to learn more about the medicine, and that’s the way it’s reflected in the index. Even if you deploy that search tech on a domain-specific corpus, like research papers, it doesn’t magically gain better understanding. But a medical researcher searching through pandemic-related papers for ibuprofen already knows what it is — what they need is an ordered presentation of how ibuprofen appears in the literature, what other drugs and effects it is most tightly correlated with, what institutions and authors are associated with studying it. Agolo “We helped with the problem of getting the right info into people’s hands,” said Wohns. And an early version of the company’s summary tech was used in combination with the OSTP’s existing search stack to make the results better. Not only does it return things that should be more relevant, but it surfaces the reasoning for that relevance, showing (if you ask it) a representation of the graph and nodes a query and related items are part of. Now they’re on to similar projects for the federal government, which is sitting on tons of reports and data but like any large organization has trouble sorting through it all. “In the two years since, we’ve re-engineered the summarizer to handle longer documents (often hundreds of pages), and optimized the knowledge graph creator to scale to handle millions of documents within a single graph,” wrote co-founder and CTO Mohamed in an email to TechCrunch. Like any self-respecting enterprise micromodel, the systems Agolo deploys tailor themselves to the data set provided by the client. Agolo Because Agolo doesn’t make its own search solution per se, it partners with the likes of Microsoft and Google, said: “We’re working with them both on their enterprise offerings, deploying our solutions in their client implementations. At Microsoft, we’re integrated into 4 sales kits, the only non-Microsoft technology included here across Financial Services, Federal, Healthcare and Retail.” So a big government organization comes to the enterprise search provider to put its documents in order, and the enterprise search provider comes to Agolo to make sure the documents are indexed and understood in a real way. “We are directly under contract with two U.S. government clients today, with a few others pending contract,” said Wohns. “In some of those, we are being integrated with other software (from Microsoft and others) but the licenses are directly with Agolo. That aligns to our business model, where we have both direct and indirect channels.” The Air Force and Defense Department are among those clients, though Wohns could not be more specific. They’re also working on a system for analyzing and ordering Environmental, Social and Governance reports from large companies — another category of documents that’s easy enough to read one or three of, but quickly becomes cumbrous as you look at 100 competing ESG statements from potential partners or investments. The company’s A round was just closed, led by Lytical Ventures, plus returning investors Microsoft M12, Google’s Assistant Investment Group, Tensility Venture Partners, Ridgeline Partners and Thomson Reuters. The company has raised over $18 million in total to date. (This paragraph previously stated that GV was an investor — it’s actually a different group in Google. My mistake.) The money will be used to staff up in sales and marketing in particular, plus the product and engineering needed to continue to work with its existing clients. It should be announcing some big ones this year, so hopefully our readers in the federal government will be able to find things a little easier then. |
Google Docs now lets you draft emails with others and export them to Gmail | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Google is introducing a new feature in Google Docs that aims to make it easier to collaborate on an email draft, the company on Wednesday. The new Google Docs email draft template he email draft template can be accessed by entering “@email” in a Google Doc. Doing so will surface a template that includes To, Cc, Bcc and Subject lines. When you’re ready to send the email, you can select the Gmail icon to export your draft to the emailing service. A Gmail compose window will pop up and all of the email fields will be automatically filled out with the information you entered in the email draft in the Google Doc. Google “We’re making it easy to collaborate on an email draft in Docs with the new email draft template,” Google said in a about the new feature. “You can mention people in the recipient fields using the @ menu without having to remember their email addresses, and collaborate on the message body using comments and suggestions.” February The new email draft template will be useful in instances where teams need to collaborate on an email together. Although you could always copy and paste the text from Google Docs and Gmail, this new integration makes it easier to use both of these products in one place and get things done faster. |
Russia’s war hits Yandex, the ‘Google of Russia’ | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | to tighten its grip on how information on the war in Ukraine is shared in Russia, and in the wake of that, tech giants in the country — which, like Facebook, Google and Twitter, are also major players in the media sphere — are starting to restructure their media assets. Yesterday Russian press reported that Yandex — a local giant often called the “Russian Google” — is in negotiations to sell its media division, with Russian social networking giant VK named as a potential buyer. Sources familiar with the matter confirm to TechCrunch that discussions to sell the division — which includes Yandex News, a news aggregator, and Yandex Zen, a blogging platform linked to a recommender engine — are “in the last stages.” They were unable to confirm a timeline for the potential sale. Yandex declined to comment on the reports. The rumors come as pressure has been to sanction Yandex. The news division is already being called out by EU regulators via sanctions connected to a (now former) key Yandex executive, Tigran Khudaverdyan. Khudaverdyan was to its list of individuals facing sanctions over Russia’s unprovoked invasion of Ukraine. Citing accusations by a former head of Yandex’s news operation, Lev Gershenzon, the EU highlighted the role Yandex News plays in spreading Kremlin propaganda. (Gershenzon, now based in Berlin, left Yandex in 2013, according to his .) That announcement was followed by , this time from Yandex: Khudaverdyan was stepping down as the deputy CEO and executive member of the board of Yandex NV — the company’s Netherlands-based parent that is publicly traded on Nasdaq. (The board said it was “shocked and surprised” to learn that he was named under EU sanctions.) “We are adding to our sanctions list even more oligarchs and regime-affiliated elites, their families and prominent businesspeople, which are involved in economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the regime,” the EU noted. “These sanctions also target those who have a leading role in disinformation and propaganda that accompany President Putin’s war against Ukrainian people. Our message is clear: Those who enable the invasion of Ukraine pay a price for their actions.” Penalties for those sanctioned include the freezing of their assets and European travel bans. The European Union said Khudaverdyan was added to its list of individuals for two reasons: one, because of his executive oversight of Yandex, and by association, of its news division, which it believes has aided and abetted the Putin regime and its war against Ukraine; and two, because Khudaverdyan was present at a meeting of oligarchs with Russian officials at the Kremlin on February 24, where they discussed the impact of impending sanctions. Yandex NV on February 25, when its market cap was at $6.8 billion. “Tigran Khudaverdyan is the executive director of Yandex — one of the leading technology companies in Russia, which specializes in intelligent products and services powered by machine learning,” the EU said in its . “Yandex’s former head of news accused the company of being a ‘key element in hiding information’ from Russians about the war in Ukraine.” The EU also referenced a product decision it implied was deterring Yandex search engine users from reading wider news about Ukraine based on search results, writing: “Moreover, the company has been warning Russian users looking for news about Ukraine on its search engine of unreliable information on the internet, after the Russian Government threatened Russian media over what they publish.” It further noted that very fact that Khudaveryan attended the meeting on February 24 to discuss the impact of Western sanctions indicated that “he is a member of the inner circle of oligarchs close to Vladimir Putin and that he is supporting or implementing actions or policies which undermine or threaten the territorial integrity, sovereignty and independence of Ukraine, as well as stability and security in Ukraine.” On top of this, as an executive at Yandex, Khudaveryan is one of the top executives in the country in tech, which the EU describes as one of the “economic sectors providing a substantial source of revenue to the Government of the Russian Federation, which is responsible for the annexation of Crimea and the destabilisation of Ukraine.” It’s not clear if Khudaveryan stepping away from his roles was a practical move — after all, he can no longer operate internationally — or if Yandex did this to try to distance its executive management from the latest accusations from the EU. The company has been in the middle of a number of other moves that have further isolated it from its international profile in recent weeks. In addition to halting its Nasdaq trading, two longtime, high-profile international board members — investor Esther Dyson and the Stanford economist Ilya Strebulaev — earlier this month. The company has it remains in a secure position financially and in respect of the scope of sanctions. In any case, divesting the news business completely could be seen as another way of distancing Yandex from all that drama. VK would be an interesting buyer in that regard. Recall that when VK’s founder, Pavel Durov, was in the process of being kicked out as the head of the company, part of the he had was that he believed that the government was already playing too strong of a role in the business after Mail.ru, which is controlled by companies connected to the Kremlin, took a controlling stake in the social media platform (it ). The burgeoning conflict in Ukraine, at that point focused on events in Crimea, was the tipping point, . Yandex has for years had ambitions to expand internationally. In practical terms that has mostly played out as a footprint across Russian-speaking countries and business in Turkey. Yandex has sought to maintain a stance that it is a “neutral” platform that’s being developed inside Putin’s Russia — arguing it has to operate within the law. But it is questionable whether Yandex, or any company, can remain neutral under the current Russian regime. Legal restrictions that apply online include media licensing rules that apply to larger news aggregators — meaning Yandex News can only show news sources that are listed in an official register overseen by the state media regulator, making “neutral” essentially still something qualified by official, government auditors. Independent media, in the process, also becomes shut out. The latest on that front is that investigative news site Bellingcat (which has been reporting on the Ukraine war and is a long-running thorn in Putin’s propaganda efforts) has been in the country. Sources familiar with the planned sale of Yandex News and Zen told TechCrunch that Yandex had previously considered selling the media division — even as long as five years ago. However we were told the complexity of unpicking the integration of these products with other Yandex properties likely put off any earlier move toward a media exit. Since then, the Kremlin has increased regulation of media in Russia — evident in developments such as a last year that news aggregators label foreign media sources as “foreign agents.” Per our sources, a decision by Yandex to get out of the space was finally accelerated after the introduction of new regulations restricting speech around the Ukraine war earlier this month when the Russian parliament approved a new law that carries a penalty of up to 15 years in prison for anyone deemed to be spreading “false” information about the Russian military. That law poses a clear risks for bloggers on platforms like Yandex Zen, as well as for the tech platform itself — if its algorithms are deemed to be inflating sanctioned content. In recent years Yandex has also been singled out for attention from Russian politicians over the working of its news sorting algorithms, as reported — accused of influencing the results of top news items (something it has repeatedly denied). Yandex had recently applied some changes to the Zen platform — likely in a bid to shrink such political and now legal risk — switching from an open recommendation model, which had pulled in content from the open Internet, to only recommending subscription-based content — a move that sparked anger from bloggers reliant on revenue generated through recommendations. But our sources suggested the company no longer believes it’s viable to continue operating in the media space while trying to maintain a claim of neutrality — and will instead focus its efforts on search and other tech-focused services, which “don’t have such a huge media effect.” “Dealing with such regulations is a very hard job — not only a technical one,” a source with knowledge of the planned sale added. The search giant has a wide range of other services and business lines, as it has sought to diversify from ad revenue — including cloud and e-commerce services, translation tech, self-driving car tech, plus ride-hailing and food delivery services, among others. One told us that Yandex needs to “reinvestigate how to restructure its business” as it gives up on media to focus more on tech — and tries to adapt to tighter Kremlin controls and an international landscape of rising sanctions against Russia — was the suggestion. Russian social media giant VK has been linked as a possible buyer for the Yandex media properties. Three of our sources confirmed it is one of the parties negotiating to buy Yandex’s media business — with one source inside VK telling us it also discussed a possible deal with Yandex last year. “They discussed buying Yandex News and Zen last year — but now is a good time to buy because Yandex wants to sell,” this source confirmed, speaking on condition of anonymity. Another source described VK as the “closest” potential buyer for Yandex News and Zen at this point — also suggesting a deal could be done “within several months” as they said “time matters for Yandex.” We contacted VK to ask for official comment on the rumors that it’s in talks to buy Yandex News and Zen but at the time of writing the company had not responded. VK does already have a news product in its suite of consumer software offerings, displaying news content via the Mail.ru internet portal. Our source at VK pointed to the potential to grow Yandex Zen in the social vacuum left by Instagram being barred from the Russian market — saying that, from a business perspective, the company is happy about the restrictions on Western social media giants since it stands to gain traffic. “We want to be the only media and only social [player] in Russia, Belarus and other [Russian-speaking countries],” the source added. Unlike Yandex, VK does not have stated ambitions to scale an international business — focusing growth efforts on local markets (however unlikely the prospect of major international growth for Yandex may now be as Western sanctions on Russia ramp up). Yandex Search, meanwhile, still has to operate under internet regulations which can — and are — being used to block entire websites and apps that the Kremlin doesn’t like, restricting the content it’s able to connect users to. Last September, for example, Yandex was forced to from search results a tactical voting app created by the jailed Kremlin critic, Alexei Navalny, to comply with a government ban. A Russian court also banned Yandex from using the phrase “smart voting” in its keyword search system — meaning it cannot serve suggested content related to that phrase — although Yandex has sought to appeal the ruling. If Kremlin restrictions and Western sanctions continue to hit Russia’s economy it could lead to a brain drain of technical talent — not least given that the IT community is likely among the most outward-facing and globally connected of the professions, with thousands of tech workers taking a personal risk to express to the war in a recent public petition, for example. There is, then, a question of how far the Kremlin may be willing to go in dialing up operational restrictions on homegrown tech companies — in case its actions end up convincing entire companies to migrate overseas (as Durov, the founder of Telegram did, leaving his earlier company, VK, behind in Russia). Russian tech businesses with international aspirations must surely be considering their options as the country becomes increasingly isolated from the rest of the world — even as others already fully folded into the Kremlin sphere of influence, eye fresh opportunities for local growth in the vacuum left by sanctioned foreigners. One thing is clear: Russia’s war on Ukraine is certainly having huge ramifications for the shape of the digital economy inside Russia. The West has targeted technology as a key lever to pressure Putin’s regime following the invasion of Ukraine. While grassroots efforts like Ukraine’s IT Army hacker group have systematically gone after and taken down the websites and internet operations of a number of Russian institutions and businesses, the U.S. and EU have slapped restrictions on Russian banks, business executives and other entities, such as the infamous troll farm known as the Internet Research Agency. Western sanctions have already contributed to a number of foreign tech giants pulling out of Russia as payments have been disrupted and high-level pressure to withdraw their services is amped up. Some of the shift in activity has been pushed by the Russian state itself. Mainstream social media platforms — including Facebook, Instagram and Twitter — have been blocked or restricted by Russia’s Internet and media censor, Roskomnadzor, as the Kremlin tightens its grip on the digital information sphere. One inevitable consequence of limits on Western tech giants is that it creates opportunities for Russian companies to step in and fill the gap. Today, for example, reported on an Instagram clone — called Rossgram — being spun up by local entrepreneurs and slated for launch on March 28. The news agency quotes a post by the initiative’s PR director on the VKontakte social network, writing: “Our group of developers were already ready for this turn of events and decided not to miss the opportunity to create a Russian analogue of a popular social network beloved by our compatriots.” Meanwhile, IIDF, a venture fund founded by the Agency for Strategic Initiatives (which itself is a nonprofit established by the Russian government), has started to of tech services that either already exist or are being built to replace or clone services that are pulling out of the country or being banned from operating. The register is being made by way of the IIDF’s accelerator, and so potentially you could imagine it also running programs to fund new startups emerging to fill that gap. |
The FCC wants your comments on preventing ‘digital discrimination’ in broadband availability | Devin Coldewey | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | Access to broadband is a must-have in today’s remote workplace, yet there are many places still where high-speed internet is unavailable, inconsistent, or overpriced. The U.S. Federal Communications Commission was assigned a job in last year’s Infrastructure Act: to improve this ongoing issue and “eliminate digital discrimination.” The agency has of doing so and now’s your chance to make your voice heard. “Section 60506 of the Infrastructure Investment and Jobs Act directs us ‘to ensure that all people of the United States benefit from equal access’ to broadband,” said in a statement. “It requires us to issue rules that facilitate this equal access, by preventing and eliminating digital discrimination, on the basis of ‘income level, race, ethnicity, color, religion, or national origin.’ That is a tall task. To do this, we need input from stakeholders far and wide: from the public; from state, local, and Tribal governments; from public interest advocates; from academics; from the private sector; and from anyone else with information and ideas.” Accordingly, the first step is not an order but a “notice of inquiry,” essentially a long list of questions that the FCC will need to answer in order to create an equitable and effective rule. What constitutes discrimination? How can we quantify it? Who has authority over it? What is the cause? If the FCC is to “facilitate equal access,” what do those terms mean in context? How much can we expect broadband providers to cover on their own, and when should federal money be used to bridge the gap? Dozens more questions like these can be found in the notice of inquiry posted on the FCC site. It’s important to get them straight first thing because the broadband industry is definitely one for loopholes. And since the idea is to define and protect vulnerable groups, what’s at stake is more than a couple of bucks on an internet bill. History has shown that internet providers, like any business, will do whatever they can to skim off a little of that government cash, even if it means defrauding the destitute. The Infrastructure Act orders that this all be carried out by November 2023, which seems to leave plenty of time, but FCC rules are pretty slow to gestate. But your comment won’t slow things down — it will likely help reinforce ideas already under consideration there and help provide a distributed gut check for things like where and how digital discrimination is occurring. If you’d like to leave a comment, and see what kinds of questions are being asked. Perhaps you have experienced redlining yourself and want to share some ways that geographic discrimination can be prevented. Maybe you have opinions on how complaints from consumers should be handled. Whatever the case, your input will be tallied and integrated. Later, when the notice of proposed rulemaking comes out, there will be another comment period for further honing the language and approach, so you’ll have other opportunities. For now, you can and in the first field (Proceedings), put 22-69. That will attach it to this part of the effort. If you have longer thoughts or supporting figures that need to be expressed in file form, using the same number. Rosenworcel certainly seems to think this is a big opportunity for the FCC to push things ahead and for her to make a mark: John Lewis said “Every generation leaves behind a legacy. What that legacy will be is determined by the people of that generation. What legacy do you want to leave behind?” I’m the first woman ever confirmed as Chair of the FCC. Here’s what I want to leave behind: A diverse agency that is more committed than ever before to realizing the power of broadband for all. I believe this goal is within reach. Now let’s use this proceeding to help make it happen. |
FTC to fine CafePress for covering up 2019 data breach | Carly Page | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | The U.S. Federal Trade Commission has proposed a settlement that will fine the former owner of U.S. custom clothing and merchandise retailer $500,000 for attempting to cover up a 2019 data breach that exposed the sensitive data of millions of users. Hackers breached CafePress’ servers in February 2019 and subsequently published the personal information of more than 23 million users on known cybercrime forums. This included millions of email addresses and passwords, unencrypted names, physical addresses, security questions and answers, and more than 180,000 unencrypted Social Security numbers. In a complaint filed against former CafePress owner Residual Pumpkin Entity and current owner PlanetArt, the company didn’t disclose the data breach until September 2019, a month after it was widely reported in the media. While CafePress had patched the vulnerability used by the hackers, the company failed to properly investigate the incident for several months, according to the FTC, and continued to allow consumers to use the information exposed in the hack to log into their accounts. The FTC complaint also takes issue with the organizations’ “shoddy security practices,” which included storing customers’ Social Security numbers and password reset answers in plaintext and storing user data longer than necessary. CafePress was aware that it had data security problems prior to the 2019 data breach, too. According to FTC’s complaint, the company discovered that some shopkeepers’ accounts had been hacked through at least January 2018, an incident which led to CafePress closing the compromised accounts and charging the owners a $25 account closure fee. The company’s network was also hit by several infections before the 2019 security breach, which the company failed to properly investigate, the FTC said, and it also “misled users by using email addresses for marketing despite its promises that such information would only be used to fulfill orders consumers had placed.” “CafePress employed careless security practices and concealed multiple breaches from consumers,” said Samuel Levine, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Consumer Protection. “These orders dial-up accountability for lax security practices, requiring redress for small businesses that were harmed, and specific controls, like multi-factor authentication, to better safeguard personal information.” As part of the settlement, Residual Pumpkin and PlanetArt will be required to roll out comprehensive information security programs that will address the problems that led to the data breaches at CafePress. This will include replacing inadequate authentication measures, such as security questions, with methods, minimizing the amount of data it collects and retains, and encrypting Social Security numbers. Spokespeople for Residual Pumpkin and PlanetArt did not respond to requests for comment prior to publication. |
Lifesaver and Techfugees launch LifesaverAid.org to send power banks to Ukrainian refugees | TechCrunch Staff | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | During the invasion of Ukraine by Russia, millions of people have become IDPs (internally displaced people) or refugees fleeing to border countries. During this time, the smartphone has taken on an enormously significant role. Not only has the world been given a window into the terrible events in the country via smartphone footage, but with today’s smartphone being a highly sophisticated communication and location-finding device, it’s become an essential tool for IDPs and refugees to communicate via messaging apps and social media. So crucial that extension cords inside and just outside Ukraine, surrounded by displaced Ukrainians planning their next steps. Two million Ukrainian refugees have flooded across Europe’s borders, and more are expected. Keeping their phones powered would provide a lifeline of safety for vulnerable individuals. But how crazy would it be to almost get to safety and have your phone die at a crucial moment? Now U.K. B-corp cleantech startup plans to ship thousands of charging banks to Ukraine and its borders. But the crucial difference is that these power packs will be pre-charged, meaning they can be used immediately. Lifesaver power bank The initiative is the result of a joint effort by Lifesaver and , the tech industry nonprofit aimed at assisting refugees globally. Since March 5, Lifesaver has sent over 2,000 fully charged power banks (which come with in-built cables) directly to Poland and key Ukrainian cities, including Lviv. Now, it will be sending even more, via the donation page. Every £7 + VAT donated will send a Lifesaver power bank directly to a Ukrainian refugee. In addition, it will be matching the sale and rental of every power bank at The O2 and Cheltenham Festival to continue to support the donation of its power banks, at cost. “I have personally been brought to tears seeing how many people’s lives have been destroyed overnight by the war in Ukraine. … The business community has a responsibility to use its resources for social good and I hope we all continue to pull together and help those who need it most,” said Archie Wilkinson, CEO of Lifesaver Power. Launched during the Syrian refugee crisis in 2015, Techfugees supports the deployment of responsible technology products and services for displaced persons across the world, and the involvement of tech industry volunteers with refugee NGOs. Techfugees will deploy its network of volunteers and partner NGOs to reach key distribution points at all the country border crossing points with Ukraine. |
Legal tech startups bringing law, order to fragmented industry | Christine Hall | 2,022 | 3 | 16 | It’s long known that the legal profession has not embraced technology as quickly as other industries. As a result, there are a number of legal tech startups eager to not only help lawyers, but automate some of the processes bogged down by pen and paper. Here, we take a look at two companies that recently secured funding, Justpoint and New Era ADR, to see their approaches. Victor Bornstein, founder and CEO of , told TechCrunch that his company is leveraging artificial intelligence to create efficiencies for both prospective plaintiffs and attorneys, initially in personal injury. It is currently working with over 1,000 law firms. Personal injury lawyers rely heavily on ads and easy-to-memorize 800 numbers to attract clients, but Justpoint believes that using data is a better tool. Here’s why: The Boulder, Colorado-based company has collected over 300,000 historical claims and uses data extraction models to plug into a law firm to provide a score on how good the firm is at winning cases, like sexual assault, medical malpractice and product liability. That’s one side. The second is equipping the firm with information on whether a certain claim is worth the law firm’s time to take, mainly because of the time involved in diving into a case, plus the fact that firms often put up their own money initially to file lawsuits and obtain expert witnesses. Justpoint also brings medical expertise in-house to process the data and train the model. “Lawyers have an incentive,” Bornstein said. “A claim could receive $2 million, but if they settle quickly, it will save a lot of effort, though they will receive much less. We’ve looked at how to make claims more efficient so lawyers can take a claim to the end instead of settling.” The company recently raised $6.9 million in a seed extension co-led by Divergent Capital and Charge Ventures. Additional investments came from Crossbeam Venture Partners, Honeystone Ventures, Interplay.vc, Weekend Fund, Turing co-founder Vijay Krishnan, Mainstreet co-founder Jackson Moses and Stonks founder Ali Moiz. It brings the total amount raised to $7.9 million. Justpoint makes money when the lawyer wins their case, which explains the company’s incentive to send claims worth spending the lawyer’s time on, Bornstein said. “That puts a lot of work on us validating the claims,” he added. “It’s also why we are seeing an uptick in legal technology. Many firms are not interested in using technology, but this allows us to do the work for them. The way we see it is in 10 years, the legal tech space will bloom in a way we have not seen.” On the dispute resolution side, , which launched in 2021, is going after a piece of the over $250 billion litigation and dispute resolution industry. Co-founder Rich Lee explained that legal disputes often take 18 to 24 months and hundreds of thousands of dollars to resolve. New Era is building a digital and virtual tool that cuts down on both the time and cost of resolving disputes by up to 90%. The company highlights risks so that companies and their law firms can reduce unnecessary litigation gamesmanship. “We are taking the temperature down, reducing acrimony and refocusing litigation back on story-telling,” Lee added. “The procedures in court systems and current arbitration systems don’t lend themselves to fast, efficient resolutions, so we rewrote them.” New Era manages all of the case intake, payments and scheduling and facilitates virtual meetings with arbitrators so that clients can get binding resolutions in as little as 60 days. The Chicago-based company recently raised $4.6 million in seed funding led by Nextview Ventures, with participation from Jump Capital. The company’s original pre-seed investors, Motivate Ventures and Alumni Ventures, also participated in this round along with a group of individual investors, including David Kalt, Sean Chou, Pete Kadens and Lon Chow. This latest round gives New Era total funding of $6.3 million. New Era charges a flat fee per case, and in less than a year, was named as the dispute resolution platform in over 50 million contracts. So far in 2022, the company has already surpassed its 2021 revenue. Lee said the goal is to triple that in the next year. Justpoint and New Era are among friends in raising capital to bring the legal industry into the digital age, with many of them also leveraging AI. Earlier this month, brought in $12 million in Series A funding for its software that automates much of the manual workflow law firms handle every day. In February, , a SaaS startup using AI to predict litigation outcomes, raised $7.5 million in Series A funding. Also, contract platform secured $4.5 million in seed funding. “There’s been growing enthusiasm for legal tech for a while now,” Zack Hutto, director of advisory within Gartner’s legal and compliance practice, told TechCrunch. “Corporate law spending is up 50% and we are projecting budgets will make a three-fold increase by 2025.” He cited a September that showed venture capital funding into legal tech topped $1 billion, which was a record amount compared to previous years. That was not something Hutto was surprised by, saying it was proof of all of the demand, which resulted in VCs wanting to grab a piece of the pie. He feels like the rise has been dramatic because it started from a small base. Corporate legal departments are spending millions of dollars, but are not using technology as much as you might expect. The legal profession was most insulated from technology and digital transformation, so the trend of startups coming in was bound to happen, though there is still some skepticism of how transformative those tools will be, Hutto added. “PDF invoices do not give you the kind of insight to make better decisions around that spend,” he said. “One-third of departments were using those in 2010, and fast-forward to the last couple of years, and that number has increased to around half of organizations using e-billing technology, but you still have to marvel at the fact that there is a large, unpenetrated market there.” |
London startup Weaver gets $4M to build out a vetted marketplace for home renovations | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | , a London-based marketplace and SaaS contract negotiation platform for matching homeowners/architects planning major home renovation projects with vetted contractors, has closed a $4 million seed round to expand nationally. The round was led by European VC btov Partners, with participation from FJ Labs, Enterprise Fund (a syndicate of former Atlassian & Docker executives) and Dr. Stefan Heitmann (founder & CEO of MoneyPark and PriceHubble), among others. The 2017 founded startup had previously raised $1.5 million in pre-seed financing from a number of angels — bringing its total raised to date to $5.5 million. Weaver’s platform matches homeowners and architects with appropriate contractors (using an algorithm), facilitating obtaining quotes and price comparison — without the usual friction from having to manually research and reach out to contractors. It is also intended to house key comms around the contract negotiation/bid process, through baked in messaging, document exchange and on-site meeting scheduling features. So the platform acts as a centralized pipeline which keeps all parties in the loop and can be used to track compliance. “We started off as two industry founders looking for product/market fit with no-code SaaS, bootstrapping whilst minimising investment. We then invited two tech founders to join us in 2020, and it took around one and a half years to reach product/market fit on a proprietary platform,” says co-founder and CEO Greg Keane on why it’s raising a seed round now. Contractors on Weaver’s platform are manually vetted by the startup before being allowed into the marketplace where they have a chance to bid for high end projects. They are also subject to ongoing checks by Weaver to review the quality of their work and spot any other concerns, such as early signs of insolvency. Weaver takes on a troubleshooting role in the case of problems during the build, too. “Weaver is fixing a fundamental problem of communication between homeowners and contractors in the following order: 1. sourcing contractors they can trust, and; 2. building confidence in a renovation price”, says Keane. “Next, we will be solving the problems of 3. understanding how to get a contract agreed, and 4. removing the risk of contractor bankruptcy with fully insured escrow payments.” “Renovation projects are matched by an algorithm to contractors”, he confirms. “We have also built the first proper SaaS tendering platform anywhere for home renovations, where users today can exchange information via messaging, document sharing, and site meeting organisation — we are working towards a network effect to kick in here.” Construction is a complex space for startups to disrupt given it’s best thought of, not as a cohesive single market to rapidly scale across but rather as a series of distinct sub-markets which can have their own workflows and suppliers (as well as, oftentimes, specific regulatory requirements to meet). But that multifaceted landscape does perhaps create opportunities to lean into necessary nuance and specialism by applying the specificity that a strong software as a service offering can bring. Notably, Weaver is also targeting its marketplace at a top-slice of home renovation projects, where the size of the project is not only large enough to support monetizing via a success fee on contractors but the risks involved — for all parties — are likely to amp up demand for vetting and centralized accountability. Hence its plan to bolt on fully insured escrow payments for homeowners, for example. Other plans the startup says it has for the seed funding are to add an extra carrot for contractors in the form of fast payments, as well as transitioning its platform from a desktop cloud-first to mobile-first product — to better align with where user engagement in this home renovation slice of the construction market is strongest. It will also be making more use of renovations pricing data it’s able to capture to create more utility for homeowners — via “intelligent renovation pricing solutions”, as Keane puts it, which will aim to give these users better feedback on where their prices sit compared to the market. “We are on our way to becoming the leaders in renovation pricing in our market, which we are confident will establish us as the go-to solution for renovation price indexing,” he suggests, adding: “We have plans to utilise this data to build a machine learning algorithm that will accurately budget and price home renovations, thereby solving one of the industry’s biggest frustrations today”. He says the issue there is homeowners typically under-budget (by 10%-30%), as they’re doing back-of-an-envelope type calculations “using standard multiples taken from crude averages”. So if Weaver can provide “rapid and accurate” pricing info for the specific project from the outset homeowners may be willing to pay for it — given that data would allow them to save or borrow the right amount before embarking on a big project (with all the risks and stress that entails), or even rethink a house purchase if it’s predicted upon a certain type of renovation. According to Keane, only a minority (40%) of The startup is also partnering with third party firms that produce fixed-price architectural drawings so it can offer their services to the ~60% of homeowners who don’t use a traditional architect so may be after that kind of help to realize their project. Weaver’s business model has three components: A success fee from contractors who win a project through the marketplace; an access fee for homeowners (a note on its website specifying that this is “free when the architect is managing pricing process” does not mean the architect pays the fee; Weaver emphasizes there is no charge for architects using its platform — rather there is no access charge in this scenario) — with tiered pricing based on increasing levels of support; and referral fees from renovation loan providers who’re able to pick up Weaver customers. While there is growing concern in the U.K. over a deepening cost of living crisis — with energy bills, for example, set to soar next month when a price cap expires, on top of rising inflation and wider economic concerns linked to global and other trade-related events — Keane is not worried this will “We are not concerned [about the impact of the cost of living crisis on demand for renovations] as our average project is £100-£300,000, which are households with more than £95,000 incomes for London and >£60,000 outside of London, and savings built up over many years,” he tells TechCrunch, going on to suggest there are other factors at play that may drive wealthier households to spend on upgrading their homes, such as in relation to climate concerns. “We are seeing macro economics pushing more households into renovating to combat energy hikes with properly insulated homes, whilst at the same time reducing household emissions. Furthermore, we anticipate the to tackle 40% of UK emissions”. Weaver’s marketplace, which has been live for over four years at this point (although only live in the current form since March 2020), has processed over $120 million worth of construction to-date, With the startup noting that orders on the platform in 2021 grew 2.6x times over 2020. It has around 400 contractor companies, 300 architect firms and around 900 homeowners/individual users registered at this stage. Weaver will be using the seed funds to expand its footprint within the U.K. to be able to serve more of the domestic home renovation market. (Currently the service covers Greater London, South East England, Birmingham, Manchester and Liverpool.) Keane says it’s planning future international expansion “eventually” — and on that front it has an eye on Germany and the U.S. where he says its research suggests the market dynamics are similar to the U.K.’s. (Although the Victorian house renovations that may be typical of many domestic projects undertaken via Weaver’s platform would, presumably, not be the norm as it expands into countries with very different types of housing stock.) “Our largest investors are based in these two markets which gives us the network to hire talent locally,” notes Keane, adding: “We thrive in metropolitan areas where there‘s a very fragmented market for contractors and the potential value for our solution is greatest, so we will be expanding beyond the U.K. by the end of 2023. “In the U.K., our closest competitors are and . In the U.S., it would be and . We are the only startup targeting architects and their clients”. |
Talenthouse flotation finally reveals a $40M exit for EyeEm, Europe’s almost-Instagram | Mike Butcher | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | has made a name for itself as an aggregator of content creators, which is then commissioned by brands for their own social media channels. Brands just can’t seem to come up with the same kind of authenticity, so they farm it out in this manner. But business is going well, so Talenthouse is now listing on the SIX Swiss Exchange (ticker THAG) in response to this demand for content creation and ability to tap into the ‘creator economy.’ The move is significant in tech startup terms because in June last year New Value AG (trading as Talenthouse) acquired long-time social photos startup . When it launched in 2011, only a year after Instagram, it was often talked of in the same breath, but the EyeEm founders studiously repeated that it was a place for for high-end content creators and photographers to sell their wares. By the time it had been acquired, EyeEm had raised a total of $24 million in VC backing. No price was released at the time for the ‘mostly shares, some cash’ deal. But the public markets flotation of Talenthouse reveals some interesting data. Roman Scharf, Co-Founder of Talenthouse told me: “The initial shares will trade around one Swiss franc, and we have 400 million shares outstanding. So the market cap tomorrow will start around 400 million Swiss francs. We paid 37,348,490 million shares for Eyeem plus some cash. Those shares at current share price are $37.3 million. But their exit was roughly $40 million, since they also got cash.” Talenthouse, with its operational headquarters in London, has 14 million members across brands including EyeEm, Ello, Zooppa and Jovoto. Members of these brands produce content that can be acquired or commissioned by companies such as PayPal, Netflix and Nike. The Creator Economy generates $2,250 billion annually, employing 30 million people worldwide, according to UNESCO. For instance, in a commission for the UN, Talenthouse took in 16,700 submissions from 142 countries, for a campaign around the Covid-19 pandemic. In a statement, Clare McKeeve, CEO of Talenthouse said: “We’ve acquired and developed brilliant companies within our portfolio so that our creatives have the tools to be part of an active community whilst successfully monetizing their skills.” Speaking to me over a call Scharf added: “The SIX market floatation is like a sandbox environment where we learn how to behave as a public company. And then we’re going to go for a NASDAQ listing, because you know Tanenhaus really is about the creative economy. And in the German-speaking world, investors don’t really understand what the creative economy is. They have no clue about Tik Tok.” Eyeem was started by Florian Meissner, Ramzi Rizk, Gen Sadakane and Lorenz Aschoff in 2011. Photographers could offer their pictures for sale via the portal and Eyeem retained part of the income. But the end, the four founders each held 1.7 percent of their company. Meissner and Rizk have since moved on to work on the app Aware, an analysis service for health data, and also become Angel investors, taking early stakes in the Gorillas delivery service. |
Philippines-based MSME platform GrowSari raises $77.5 million Series C | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | , a Manila-based platform for digitizing small businesses in the Philippines, announced today it has raised a total of $77.5 million for its Series C round. Along with prior funding, including , this brings the company’s total raised to about $110 million. Investors included the International Finance Corporation, KKR, Wavemaker Partners and the Temasek Group’s Pavilion Capital. The new capital will be used for expansion into new store formats, building a logistics and fulfillment network and hiring for GrowSari’s operations, technology and data science teams. Co-founder and CEO Reymund Rollan told TechCrunch that GrowSari raised again because it wants to expand its fintech offerings for store owners and build its supplier marketplace, including commodities. It also plans to serve more types of MSMEs, like carinderias (small eateries), small over-the-counter pharmacies and other roadside and market shops. Founded in 2016, GrowSari’s tools for small businesses now include inventory management, pricing tools, a logistics network and working capital loans. It also enables retailers to offer telco top-ups and bill payments. Its customers now include 100,000 stores in more than 220 municipalities in Luzon, and it is planning to expand into Mindanao soon. GrowSari’s app. GrowSari Other plans include adding more financial services and logistics solutions, with plans to have more than 50 fulfillment centers across the country. In a prepared statement, Stephanie von Friedeburg, IFC’s Senior Vice President of Operations said, “The pandemic has fundamentally changed how business works … Businesses that ignore digital technology put themselves at an immediate disadvantage. Our investment will enable Growsari to expand digital adoption and financial services for MSMEs, which is critical to keep them competitive, and for a resilient and inclusive recovery.” |
Singapore-based esports startup Ampverse lands $12M | Catherine Shu | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Singapore-headquartered esports startup has raised $12 million in Series A funding led by Falcon Capital. The company says this is the largest Series A raised by an esports organization in Southeast Asia, based on data from PitchBook and other third-party platforms. The round will be used to expand in Indonesia and the Philippines, acquire more esports teams and scale Ampverse’s play-to-earn unit. Founded in 2019, Ampverse’s portfolio includes Thai esports brands Bacon and MiTH; Vietnamese team SBTC Esports and India’s 7Sea. Its play-to-earn business allows players to earn rewards by playing games like Axie Infinity, Townstar and Spider Tanks, and also get training from professional esports players. Ampverse has worked with clients like Disney, Samsung, McDonald’s, Nestlé, Lazada and Porsche. Ampverse CEO Ferdinand Gutierrez said that the company’s revenue has grown 125% over the last 12 months, during which it expanded into Vietnam and India. Gutierrez told TechCrunch that Ampverse was founded because its team saw a “huge opportunity to create a company with IP and products for gaming fans that sits at the intersection of gaming and popular culture, be it esports teams, merchandise product or other fan experiences.” The company’s leadership team has previously held roles at media, entertainment and gaming companies like Havas, Twitch and Universal Music. He added that expanding into Indonesia and the Philippines will “round off our SEA footprint,” which already includes Singapore, Thailand and Vietnam. “We felt these two markets were strategically important markets in SEA, given what dynamic esports markets they are, as well as due to the popularity of games such as Mobile Legends in those markets which complements the existing games titles our teams compete in,” Gutierrez said, noting that Indonesia is the largest gaming market in Southeast Asia. Meanwhile in the Philippines, there are more than 43 million active gamers, a number which has grown by 12.9% yearly since 2017 thanks to the growing accessibility of smartphones. Other participants in the round include returning investors Vulpes and Gandel Invest, along with individuals like Rob Gilby, former Southeast Asia managing director for Disney; GoGame CEO David Ng; Culture Group CEO Michael Patent; and Marcus John, former vice president of Lagadere and Wolfpack Fund. In a prepared statement, Falcon CEO Wil Rondini said, “The growth that the Ampverse team have delivered in a short period is monumental. With their continued esports M&A strategy and play-to-earn vision, we know that the future is bright for Ampverse.” |
India’s Classplus raises $70 million to help teachers and creators expand their reach | Manish Singh | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | At a time when so many edtech firms in India are attempting to cut their reliance on teachers, a Noida-based startup that is helping teachers and creators operate, manage and sell courses to students has raised $70 million in a new financing round. That startup, , is now valued at $570 million. Alpha Wave Global and Tiger Global co-led Classplus’ Series D round, the four-year-old startup said. Abu Dhabi-based Chimera Ventures and RTP Global also participated in the round, which follows the startup’s . The new round has more than doubled the startup’s valuation, it said in a statement. There are millions of teachers in India who teach students in small Indian cities and towns. In their own localities, they are among the most popular from whom students wish to learn. Their offline coaching continues to flourish. But traditionally, these teachers have struggled to reach students living just a few miles from them. With the advent of smartphones and cheap mobile data, some teachers have started to experiment with a variety of tools — from a spreadsheet processor to YouTube, Zoom, SurveyMonkey and Instamojo — to record, stream and monetize their lessons. But the experience of using so many tools is confusing and clumsy. That’s where Classplus comes into the picture. “We enable these teachers and small institutions to stream, distribute, sell and manage their classes online through just one platform,” said , co-founder and chief executive of Classplus, in an interview with TechCrunch. “The platform took off in 2019 as educators were able to leverage it to become brands, and do commerce and make more money. They were able to reach more students than ever before without cannibalising their offline businesses,” he said. Things changed for the better for Classplus during the second wave of the pandemic, says Rustagi, when creators, artists, fitness and lifestyle experts and others discovered and started to use the platform to sell their courses to their audiences. “Now we have both academic and non-academic educators on the platform,” he said. The unexpected vote of confidence from creators has made Classplus confident that it can also serve the creator economy. “Many of these people have large social followings, but they are not able to make money. On Classplus, they are finally able to monetize. And like teachers, they don’t have to work with several business-to-business vendors. We are offering them a one-stop shop for everything,” he added. The startup, which has built and designed the tools in-house, says educators on the platform additionally also receive instant feedback from their students. They get access to analytics that shows just how many students attended their classes and how they performed. The platform, amusingly, also allows them to generate teasers of their classes. “We have ‘Indianized’ the platform with local needs. Just like how you have trailers in movies and shows, these teachers’ classes also have their teasers.” On top of it, Rustagi said one of the reasons Classplus has been able to make inroads outside of urban India has to do with localization of content itself. “The vast majority of classes — academic as well as non-academic — uploaded on our platform is in local languages with local accents. What we found was that students here want to learn from people they can relate to,” he said. Classplus, which counts Blume Ventures and GSV Ventures among its early backers, has amassed over 100,000 educators and creators from more than 3,000 towns and cities of India. More than three-fourths of its creators live outside of urban Indian cities. These customers are able to increase their profitability by two to three times within six months of adopting the Classplus platform, the startup said. “Over the last few years, Classplus has established itself as a market leader and has created a highly differentiated and sophisticated technology product, while building a robust management team,” said Navroz D. Udwadia, co-founder of Alpha Wave Global (formerly known as Falcon Edge Capital). “We like that the company can successfully cater to the large offline market of educators across segments such as K-12, test prep, etc. We also see a significant improvement in end tutor economics as a result of using Classplus — this results in sector leading monetization and retention trends. It is therefore our privilege to double down on Classplus with our investment in this round.” The young firm plans to deploy the fresh funds to go deeper in smaller Indian cities and towns and broaden its product offerings to further enrich a teacher and creator’s needs. Classplus is also expanding to some international markets including Singapore, Vietnam and Malaysia. “Going forward, we’ll also be investing in new acquisitions and partnerships that will enable us to continue delivering best-in-class experience to the educators and helping them create an impact in the education system by building bigger and stronger businesses,” Rustagi added. |
Sourceful grabs $20M to make more packaging less polluting | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | , an Index Ventures-backed supply chain transparency startup, has fast-fuelled with a $20 million Series A around half a year after it announced . The latest raise is once again led by Index, with Coatue and Eka Ventures also participating. The 2020-founded startup works with brands to shrink the environmental damage associated with their product sourcing choices in areas like packing, via offering a marketplace of vetted suppliers. The startup also takes on logistics, handling the buying and shipping piece for brands (including a little warehousing if they need it) — monetizing by taking a commission on the overall price. Sourceful has chosen to focus on packaging for its initial push to help brands reduce their supply chain emissions on account of the ubiquity of the challenge. (Decisions around packaging are also likely to require less lengthy sign-off for brands than environmentally minded design revisions of actual products.) The startup bakes a packaging design interface into its platform so brands can experiment with design tweaks and see in real time how those choices impact the associated carbon footprint, helping them to make reductions in emissions. Since we last spoke, it’s gained ISO (International Organization for Standardization) certification for the lifecycle assessment (LCA) methodology it applies so customers get an understanding of the carbon footprint of their product’s supply chain — a development its investors believe will help support faster global scaling. Commenting in a statement, Danny Rimer, partner at lead investor Index Ventures, said: “Supply chains represent one of the world’s biggest sustainability roadblocks but they also contain one of our biggest opportunities to reduce global emissions. “Sourceful is spearheading the effort to reduce the carbon footprint of supply chains, with the expertise, data and AI to give businesses the choices and the transparency they never had. Following Sourceful’s recent ISO verification, we believe the brand can go truly global and work with the world’s biggest businesses, to help build tomorrow’s sustainable world economy.” Sourceful has around 30 customers since it launched the platform in Q1, but says it’s expecting this to step up significantly from here on in. The Series A funding will go on fuelling the platform’s expansion into international markets, growing its presence in Europe, Asia and the U.S. — including by a plan to double the size of its 65-strong team within the next two years. It is also planning to develop four new product categories, including integrating lifecycle assessments for plastics into the platform. (The other three packaging areas it’ll be adding are recycled plastics, with dynamic pricing and LCA calculation expected to be integrated into its platform by the end of April; as well as glass; and plastic alternatives.) Sourceful points to an incoming , due to start April 1, which will mean some businesses face paying penalties if they’re using plastic packaging with <30% PCR (post-consumer recycled content). An historic signed earlier this month also committed signatories around the world to ending plastic pollution by “As we were building the product, we increasingly realised the opportunity was in helping all parts of the supply chain, including the manufacturers, their suppliers and all partners in the network that feed into making the product. Digitising the supply flow has major benefits for a much larger set of parties than we had imagined,” CEO and co-founder Wing Chan tells TechCrunch, fleshing out why it’s dipped back into VC so quickly after what was already a chunky seed raise (albeit one commensurate with the scale of the challenge of reforming supply chains). “We are also building a company that counters greenwashing in a space where marketing regulation and consumer protection are still limited. We’re taking no shortcuts and have decided to take the road less travelled when it comes to the investment we’re making in certification, supplier and material due diligence, and the data science required to get trusted results,” he adds. Chan says Sourceful is seeing the most rapid uptake from e-commerce businesses that are prioritising sustainability — suggesting that trend will “only grow in urgency with mounting government regulation and consumer pressure”. “We are also working with young businesses, because in today’s world, all new brands must put sustainability at heart of what they do,” he adds. In an illustration of how seemingly small design choices around packaging can add up to noteworthy emissions reductions, Sourceful says its data shows that businesses can halve their carbon footprint by switching base materials and adhesives — such as the choice of gummed tape. The choice of self-adhesive tape can also shrink environmental impact by up to 20%. While mailer boxes can be optimized to shrink associated carbon emissions by up to 12% — such as by using custom-sized packaging to reduce void space and visualising and proofing packaging online to reduce the need to deliver samples. Overall, Sourceful says consumer industries represent three of the top four most-polluting sectors, accounting for around 35% of global emissions — with 83% of those emissions flowing from their supply chains. So there’s no shortage of efficiencies to drive. The startup further points out that e-commerce packaging in particular has a worsening environmental impact as online sales grow by 15% annually — arguing there’s little visibility or data available on its production and material footprint, something Sourceful hopes its platform will be able to change. |
Crypto mining is approaching a key inflection point | Warren Rogers | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | space is approaching a key inflection point. There are currently two dominant proof of work-based coins, Bitcoin and Ethereum. Bitcoin’s consensus rules are immutable and historically have not been able to be altered by some of the largest exchanges and miners in the space. Ethereum is constantly changing, and the biggest change could come as soon as Q2 2022. Ethereum is expected to transition from a proof of work-based consensus protocol to proof of stake (PoS), which means that graphics card miners will no longer be useful for adding blocks to the Ethereum blockchain. However, the Ethereum community has been discussing this transition since 2016, and it continuously gets pushed back. During the Ethereum Core Devs Meeting #124 on October 15, a proposal to push the December 2021 “difficulty bomb” was discussed. The difficulty bomb exponentially increases mining difficulty at a certain block height, and it essentially freezes the chain and forces a hard fork. The difficulty bomb is now estimated to occur around June 2022, and many in the community expect the transition to proof of stake to finally occur. When this transition occurs, it will be very destructive for miners who are currently mining Ethereum. These miners will have to transition their graphics cards to mine other coins that are profitable with their equipment, and those coins are significantly smaller than Ethereum, in addition to likely being less profitable to mine. It is very possible that if this transition to PoS does occur as recently announced, the graphics card market will be flooded with cheap used chips from miners. What this means for crypto miners is that Ethereum miners have a very high risk that their machines become obsolete overnight. Their cash flows would immediately dry up, and the resale value of their GPUs will drop significantly. Knowing this risk, a large majority of capital being deployed into crypto mining is going into Bitcoin mining, specifically. |
Daily Crunch: Citing ‘global market uncertainties,’ Sea flatlines Shopee India | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Monday, March 28, 2022! Alas, I knew this day was coming, and here it is. and are taking over my bits of Daily Crunch from here on out, though I will be back occasionally to fill in when they are on break. Not that I am leaving TechCrunch. Not a bit of it. I’m off to as my main project, so am leaving you in their very capable hands. As an addendum, will keep writing the TechCrunch+ section, which I am very thankful for. It’s been a super huge treat to write for you here for so many months. Hugs, and good luck! — Elon Musk may be threatening to spool up his own social media platform, but Amanda today why it’s too early to whine about it on Twitter. “When it comes to Musk actually following through on his wacky Twitter ideas, his track record isn’t great,” she drily concludes. It looks like French accelerator The Family is going through a bitter family feud, for alleged forgery and “diverting €3 million that was supposed to be invested in several startups” Oh, and don’t miss Natasha’s Startups Weekly newsletter, where, this week, she’s digging into how . / Getty Images Employees are hired to do one specific job, which is why even early-stage startups can become siloed. Companies that find ways to integrate their sales flow and customer success operations have an advantage, writes Erol Toker, founder and CEO of Truly.co. “Optimizing your unique path to better connect with customers requires having a cross-discipline team that’s focused solely on that objective and sees the client as their guiding star,” Toker says. “We call that RevOps.” |
Epsilon3 co-founder talks about building a SaaS company for space | Maggie Stamets | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Hello and welcome back to Found, the podcast where we tell the stories behind the startups. This week and talked with Laura Crabtree, the co-founder and CEO of Space SaaS company , which helps companies run their complex engineering, testing and operational procedures. Here’s a sneek peak into what they get into in their conversaiton: Don’t forget to featuring Dylan Field from Figma this Thursday at 12pm PT/3pm ET. and let us know a bit about yourself and what you think of Found. Connect with us: |
Papaya Global to buy Azimo for $150M-$200M to expand its payroll payments to more markets | Ingrid Lunden | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Six months after raising , is making a key acquisition to expand its cloud-based HR and payroll platform globally Terms of the acquisition are not officially being disclosed, but a source close to the companies tells me that the deal was between $150 million and $200 million, a figure others appear to have also . Papaya is acquiring the full business upon the deal closing, including all of Azimo’s employees, the company said. For some context, Papaya Global — backed by companies like Insight Partners and Tiger Global — was valued at $3.7 billion in its last funding round in September 2021, after growing revenues 300% each year for the last three years. Azimo, meanwhile, was backed by investors including and and competes with the likes of Wise (FKA TransferWise). Both companies were among a shortlist that Facebook tapped several years ago when it first started to weigh up a move into money transfer services (a service it now ). The deal will help Papaya Global on two levels. First, it will help it expand the company expand its geographic footprint: Azimo currently has payment licenses in the U.K., the Netherlands, Canada, Australia and Hong Kong, and it operates a payment network in more than 160 countries, while Papaya Global (not to be confused with ) operated services in 150 countries just prior to this deal, Eynat Guez, Papaya Global CEO and co-founder, told TechCrunch. Second, it will help Papaya Global expand the services it provides. These include not just faster (instant) payment of payroll, but potentially a much wider selection of remittance services for people who are working in one country but have family or others they want to pay in another. In the past those individuals might have used other services like Wise (or indeed Azimo) to handle those payments; now Papaya Global can keep them on their own network (and thus capture the commissions and foreign exchange fees) around those transactions. “Papaya’s customers will benefit hugely from our long experience in building payment technology and operating as a regulated payments business,” Azimo CEO Richard Ambrose said in a statement. It also plays into a strategy Papaya Global has been to provide an all-in-one, end-to-end service for its customers — which include not just employers sourcing and eventually hiring people in other markets (be they freelancers or full-time or something in between), but increasingly services for those employees themselves. “Payroll payments made easy regardless of geography are what set us apart from other technology vendors, and this acquisition will make it possible for companies to make instant payments to their global teams,” said Guez in a statement. “Azimo’s global digital payment network, multiple payment licences, and deep fintech expertise will also enable us to build new payroll-related services for our business customers and their employees.” For Azimo, the company that it was profitable, and that was the last year that it raised equity funding, too. (A 2020 injection of from the European Investment Bank came in the form of debt.) But that also meant that the company, competing against the likes of Wise, was also potentially not scaling as much as it could have been had it followed a different funding trajectory, in particular in these recent pandemic years, which saw in the remittance market. that its valuation was a modest $136 million back in 2019. Further to that, there’s been a long-term trend of consolidation in the market — one that will continue for years to come, given how fragmented the remittance market is today and how thin the margins are for those players who are not scaling. Tying its star to Papaya Global and a wider service offering spanning HR and payroll is one way of supercharging the business in a way that might have been more challenging on its own for Azimo. “Combining Azimo’s assets and expertise with an emerging global leader in remote working enablement like Papaya will allow them to deliver even more value for their business customers, especially those increasingly paying and managing remote employees,” said Azimo chairman and founder Michael Kent in a statement. One of the reasons the companies are not talking publicly about the sale price is that the deal has not completely closed yet: It will require regulatory approvals in their respective markets, and so they will continue to operate independently until those are reached. |
Spotify’s COVID-19 content advisory continues roll out two months after Joe Rogan uproar | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | You probably remember a few months ago when you couldn’t turn on the news, check Twitter or talk to your conservative uncle without broaching the issue of Joe Rogan, who is signed to an exclusive deal with Spotify worth . In January, 270 physicians and scientists published an to Spotify demanding that it institute misinformation policies in light of Rogan’s podcast, which and has for false narratives about the virus. Then, musical icons like and pulled their libraries from the platform in protest, prompting Spotify to belatedly publish its . Now, Spotify finally rolled out a content advisory warning on podcasts that discuss COVID-19, two months after it committed to launching the feature. The advisory is a blue bar that appears atop episodes of podcasts that discuss COVID-19, prompting listeners to click to learn more. This directs users to its , which it in March 2020. TechCrunch asked Spotify how its app determines which podcast episodes address COVID-19 — it appears that the advisory shows up if words like “COVID-19,” “coronavirus” or “pandemic” appear in the metadata of an episode, including its title. “On January 30, 2022, Spotify announced plans to add a content advisory to any podcast episode that includes a discussion about COVID-19. Three days later, on Feb 2, we launched the content advisory on our platform and we’ve been adding it to episodes that include discussion about COVID-19 on a rolling basis ever since. Today, the COVID content advisory appears on ~1.4 million podcast episodes on our platform,” a Spotify spokesperson said. Social platforms like Twitter acted faster in their attempts to combat the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. Just days after lockdowns in the U.S. began, Twitter any tweets that could help the virus spread. Two months later, it a coronavirus advisory warning on tweets that may contain false information. Competing streaming services like Apple Podcasts don’t have these advisory warnings, though Apple Podcasts also doesn’t fund a podcaster who talks to right-wing conspiracy theorists for fun. Despite its PR nightmare, as calls to boycott Spotify trended across social media, the backlash did little to . Spotify remains dominant, though other platforms have begun to at its lead. |
Max Q: A landing system for the moon and beyond | Aria Alamalhodaei | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Hello and welcome back to Max Q. Before we dive into this week’s news, a brief note: I’ll be experimenting with the newsletter over the coming weeks, trying out new segments and features, and : What do you enjoy reading? What do you want more of? What bores you to tears? Shoot me an email with your feedback at In this issue: NASA will be giving another company a chance to send a lander to the moon. Nearly a year after the agency announced that SpaceX beat out competitors (including Blue Origin and Boeing) for the opportunity, the agency said it would be opening competition for a second lunar lander under a new contract called Sustaining Lunar Development. NASA came under fire from both private industry and Congress when it selected SpaceX as its sole awardee for the Human Landing System (HLS) contract, the first contract for a lunar lander. Blue Origin went so far as to . But this time around, NASA Administrator Bill Nelson said the agency was all about fostering competition. “We think, and so does the Congress, that competition leads to better, more reliable outcomes and benefits everybody,” he said. “It benefits NASA, [it] benefits the American people. It is obvious, the benefits of competition.” The agency will release a draft request for proposals at the end of the month, HLS program manager Lisa Watson-Morgan told reporters. That will be followed by a final request for proposals later in the spring, which will be open to all American companies besides SpaceX. Artist’s rendering of SpaceX’s Starship and lunar lander. SpaceX Firefly Aerospace may be heading to the public markets via a merger with a blank-check firm, a recent suggests. The small-launch startup just closed a led by AE Industrial Partners. The firm acquired interest in the launch company from Noosphere Ventures, a fund run by Ukrainian entrepreneur Max Polyakov. Noosphere sold its interest in Firefly after it came under scrutiny from the Committee on Foreign Investment in the U.S. The , which relates to a proposed launch of Firefly’s second Alpha rocket from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California this spring, adds that the acquisition involved “the majority of Firefly Aerospace’s equity” and was by “special purpose acquisition vehicles controlled by AE Industrial Partners.” Firefly Inflation isn’t just showing up at the gas pump. SpaceX is also raising prices for everything, from its Starlink satellite broadband service to launch. Regarding the Starlink price jump, SpaceX cites inflation as the only reason behind the new pricing structure: “The sole purpose of these adjustments is to keep pace with rising inflation,” it wrote in an email to existing customers. The company also offered a partial refund of $200 on cancellations with hardware returns if a customer has been on the service for less than a year, or a full refund if it’s been less than 30 days. Starlink Casey Handmer An artist’s rendering of the Vulcan. is a show about founders and company-building, featuring people actually doing the work. Each week, News Editor and Managing Editor interview one early-stage startup founder about how they took the plunge to begin with, how they navigate everything from building product roadmaps to raising funding from some of the world’s top investors, and how they manage failure. This week, they chatted with Laura Crabtree, co-founder and CEO of Epsilon3. Check it out below. |
Smart electric panel company Span gets a $90M jolt of cash | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | The lowly breaker panel has been around for a century without getting much love, and along comes . The company is making a compelling bid for better, smarter electrical panels, and just got a $90 million top-up to continue its evolution. The company is solving the challenges of electrification and micro-grid balancing, ensuring that the smart homes of the future have better visibility in the how, what and why of power consumption. Span , and launched a earlier this year to go with the smart panels. “I was very fortunate to join Tesla in the very early days of defining what Tesla Energy subsequently became. So I was one of the early leaders in the Energy Group. People are probably most familiar with the Powerwall battery, but I was the leader of the product team there that designed, developed and deployed residential products, commercial industry products, as well as utility-scale products both on the hardware and software side. During my time, they were also responsible for products like the solar roof and deployment of solar, the glass roof part, if you will,” Arch Rao, CEO and founder of SPAN told me in an interview earlier this year. “One of the things that I got to see firsthand while deploying home batteries and solar systems and electric vehicle charging systems around the world, is that there is a fundamental problem tied to infrastructure. It is going to be a deterrent to the adoption of distributed clean energy, especially if you believe that electrification is a meaningful part of the Fossil Free journey that we want to be on. If we want to supplant [fossil-fuel focused appliances] with superior electric appliances, it’s going to require a massive upgrade to the infrastructure starting with the home electrical panel.” “We started with reinventing the electrical panel, as it is the core component to any scalable path to electrification of homes, but the consumer experience demands more,” says Rao. “We’re excited to deploy this new capital to expand our product offerings that simplify the decarbonization of homes, and to continue developing the unparalleled approach to home energy management that Span is uniquely positioned to deliver.” Span’s Series B funding round was led by and Wellington Management. Other investors include Angeleno Group, FootPrint Coalition, Obsidian Investment Partners and A/O PropTech. The company explains it will use the new funding to continue developing the Span Home suite of energy products and solutions to drive commercial growth and accelerate the electrification of homes. |
Apple said to be cutting iPhone SE production 20% over Ukraine, inflation concerns | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Apple’s latest earnings report found the hardware giant amid the ongoing chip shortage. All told, the company marked a 9% growth in iPhone sales, as most of the rest of the market contracted. When it comes to navigating the supply chain, there’s a lot to be said for the leverage that comes with being one of the biggest players. But not even a giant like Apple is immune from the impact of global affairs. In the early days of the pandemic, the company declined to offer guidance, due to uncertainties. Probably the right move — given the way things have been going in the world over the past two years. And now, the latest iPhone SE is arriving to a kind of perfect storm of global issues. Citing conversations with sources close to the matter, that Apple is cutting production on the budget handset by 20%. Observers were, no doubt, expecting some reduction, courtesy of the one-two punch of the Ukraine invasion and inflation, but the size of the figure comes as a surprise for a brand new handset — and the first addition to the series since 2020. The drop amounts to somewhere between 2-3 million handsets for the quarter. At the beginning of the month, Apple announced that it would be , following its invasion of neighboring Ukraine. “We will continue to evaluate the situation and are in communication with relevant governments on the actions we are taking,” the company noted at the time. “We join all those around the world who are calling for peace.” A number of other key consumer hardware companies have taken similar action, including Apple’s chief competitor, Samsung. Both brands have routinely ranked in the top five smartphone market share in the country. The global chip shortage continues to be a factor here, as well, along with broader inflation issues, which have impacted purchasing decisions. These sorts of financial concerns invariably play a role in sales numbers for products like smartphones, which are sometimes categorized as non-essential purchases. At the very least, it has the effect of causing users to hang onto older devices a bit longer than they otherwise might have. Along with the impact on the SE, the publication notes that orders for AirPods have also been dramatically scaled by around 10 million for the whole of 2022. A reduction in iPhone 13 production, meanwhile, is reportedly largely the result of seasonal demand fluctuations. TechCrunch has reached out to Apple for comment. |
Lapsus$ found a spreadsheet of accounts as they breached Okta, documents show | Zack Whittaker | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | The Lapsus$ hackers used compromised credentials to break into the network of customer service giant Sitel in January, days before subsequently accessing the internal systems of authentication giant Okta, according to documents seen by TechCrunch that provide new details of the cyber intrusion that have not yet been reported. Customers only learned of Okta’s January security breach on March 22 after the Lapsus$ hacking group revealing it had accessed Okta’s internal apps and systems some two months earlier. Okta admitted the compromise in , and later confirmed 366 of its corporate customers are affected by the breach, or about 2.5% of its customer base. The documents provide the most detailed account to date of the Sitel compromise, which allowed the hackers to later gain access to Okta’s network. Okta is used by thousands of organizations and governments worldwide as a single sign-on provider, allowing employees to securely access a company’s internal systems, such as email accounts, applications, databases and more. The documents, obtained by independent security researcher and shared with TechCrunch, include a Sitel customer communication sent on January 25 — more than a week after hackers first compromised its network — and a detailed timeline of the Sitel intrusion compiled by incident response firm Mandiant dated March 17 that was shared with Okta. According to the documents, Sitel said it discovered the security incident in its VPN gateways on a legacy network belonging to Sykes, a customer service company working for Okta that Sitel acquired in 2021. VPNs, or virtual private networks, are often since they can be exploited to remotely access a company’s network. The timeline details how the attackers used remote access services and publicly accessible hacking tools to compromise and navigate through Sitel’s network, gaining deeper visibility to the network over the five days that Lapsus$ had access. Sitel said that its Azure cloud infrastructure was also compromised by hackers. According to the timeline, the hackers accessed a spreadsheet on Sitel’s internal network early on January 21 called “DomAdmins-LastPass.xlsx.” The filename suggests that the spreadsheet contained passwords for domain administrator accounts that were exported from a Sitel employee’s LastPass password manager. Sitel spokesperson Matt Jaffe did not dispute this characterization when reached by TechCrunch prior to publication, but instead declined to comment. A day after publication, Sitel said in a statement that the spreadsheet “simply listed account names from legacy Sykes but did not contain any passwords,” but did not offer any evidence for this claim. About five hours later, the hackers created a new Sykes user account and added the account to a user group called “tenant administrators,” which have broad access to the organization, likely to create a “backdoor” account to Sitel’s network that the hackers could use if they were later discovered and locked out. The Lapsus$ hackers were compromising Okta’s network at around the same time, according to of events. The timeline shows that the hackers last accessed Sitel’s network on January 21 at 2 p.m. (UTC), around 14 hours after accessing the spreadsheet. Sitel issued a company-wide password reset to try to lock out the attackers. Okta has faced criticism for not warning customers sooner of the Sitel breach following its receipt of Mandiant’s report dated March 17. Okta chief security officer David Bradbury said the company “should have moved more swiftly to understand its implications.” Okta was unable to comment when reached prior to publication. Mandiant also did not dispute the contents of the reports but declined to comment. Okta is just one of several big-name companies targeted by the Lapsus$ hacking and extortion group in recent months. The Lapsus$ group first emerged on the hacking scene in December after targeting Brazil’s Ministry of Health in a cyberattack that stole 50 terabytes of data, including citizens’ vaccination information. Since then, the gang has targeted as well as Big Tech giants including , , and , touting its access and stolen data to the tens of thousands of subscribers of its Telegram channel, while often making unusual demands in exchange for not publishing their victims’ stolen files, U.K. police said last week they had connected to the incidents, all aged between 16 and 21. |
How Plaid’s CTO grew his engineering team 17.5x in 4 years | Ron Miller | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | launch a startup, you’re just trying to build a product and get it to market. The first group of engineers has an “all hands on deck” mentality, and they’ll do whatever needs to be done to make the product happen. But as your business grows and its needs change, that mentality is no longer as viable, particularly as you bring more people on board. As you add more talent, you’ll have to organize your engineering team into more logical groups. That means more defined roles, with individuals and teams made responsible for specific parts of the product while continuing to expand its capabilities. How well you manage the transition from an organically grown team to a more purposefully organized, efficient machine can be key to how successful your company will be as it scales. Plaid CTO Jean-Denis Greze, whose company creates APIs for banks, had to deal with that kind of transition when he arrived in 2017. The company was in the midst of Series A financing with about 20 engineers who were still trying to feel their way to product-market fit. Since his arrival, the engineering team has expanded to 350 people, and the company’s valuation has blown up to $13.4 billion. Carefully growing and organizing the engineering team has been been a big part of that success, especially for company building tools designed for developers. How did a growing company like Plaid scale the engineering team 17.5x, in four years keep everything in working order? We talked to Greze to get some answers. When Greze joined the company just as it was reaching the tail end of its Series A maturation, engineering was organized in a more generalized fashion, reacting to customer requirements as needed with little specialization. And he felt that while this was working for the short term, it wasn’t really sustainable. “If we had an important product requirement for a set of customers, we would just take some engineers — not randomly, but with the right skills — and we would have them work on that project until it was done. And then they would go back to the general pool,” he explained. After six to twelve months at the company, the team had already grown to over 30 engineers, and Greze recognized that the company would soon need to take a different approach. The solution was to divide the engineers into more dedicated teams, but he is careful to point out that he wasn’t simply dictating these changes. Before he did anything, Greze met with the founders as well as the engineers doing the work to discuss the new way of working, and he found most people were coming to the same conclusion that he had. |
Instagram’s latest test makes it easier to support social movements through hashtags | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Instagram is testing a new feature that will make it easier for users to discover and support social causes directly through hashtags, the company on Monday. Now, when you search for specific hashtags associated with certain social movements, you’ll have the option to support them through new options. Once you get get to a hashtag page, you can select “Support” to learn more about the movement. There’s also a “Spread the Word” button that lets you share the hashtag page with your friends via a DM. The company says the new feature will also make it easier to raise awareness for these causes through a “Create a Fundraiser” button that can used to start raising money on behalf of a cause. Starting today we’re testing out a new way for people to learn more about social movements and to get the word out. — Instagram Comms (@InstagramComms) “Today, we’re beginning to test a new feature that helps people find and support social movements on Instagram,” the company said in a about the announcement. “Hashtags have long been a place where people discover new causes to support on Instagram, and now when you search for specific hashtags associated with certain movements, you’ll have the option to support them. People often come to Instagram to make their voices heard, elevate causes and bring communities together. They’re eager to support causes they hear about on Instagram and are always looking for new ways to take action — these updates will make it easier to do so.” The company is rolling out the new feature to select hashtags focused on popular movements on Instagram, including #BlackLivesMatter, #womensrights and #climatecrisis. Instagram says it consulted with several organizations, including the NAACP, GLAAD, AAJC, Hispanic Heritage Foundation and Illuminative to select the initial list of hashtags. Instagram plans to continue to work with organizations to enhance the feature. |
Contingent targets broken procurement processes | Haje Jan Kamps | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Evaluating and keeping an eye on the suppliers to your business is crucial, and fantastically complicated. leaps to the rescue, armed with a freshly printed $8.2 million check from investors. The SaaS platform helps companies procure more strategically and better manage supply chain risk and compliance. “The typical questionnaire process to onboard suppliers is widely accepted to be fundamentally broken. A huge amount of buyer and seller time and resources are wasted in collecting information from suppliers, most of which is rarely read,” Tai Alegbe, co-founder and CEO of Contingent, says. “It’s hard to spot risks, with companies reliant on supplier self-certification, and with no time or information to verify claims.” The company is wrapping up a lot of compliance, supply-chain and supplier challenges and surfaces potential risks. “The company was conceived quite some time ago. It built on insights I had gathered from previous experience, in and around third-party risks, supply chain and procurement. It became really clear at previous companies that there were common themes and challenges that corporations were facing,” explains Alegbe. “Supply chain is a particularly acute challenge for the world globally today. That is true for almost all companies and for governments as well.” The company aims to address a lot of different categories of business risk, with the ultimate goal of increasing resilience for the companies it works with. The company looks at risks from a supply perspective, resilience from a financial perspective and Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) and the Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) perspective. It also aims to give sustainability center stage as part of the process. On the whole, the company looks at the actual risks that its customers might have in terms of being able to deliver their product or service. “At the heart of it, we are building a new category. We believe that supply chain and procurement as a function is going to radically evolve over the next 5-10 years, where companies will pick suppliers based on their values… that companies will choose to do business with other companies aligned with their values, versus simply just their capabilities and costs,” Alegbe predicts. “And as a result, we see that as an emerging new compliant-by-design category. We see ourselves as being at the heart of that shift, and we can really help companies embrace that change.” The round was led by , with participation from Connect Ventures, Concentric, Seedcamp, Ascension and Working Capital Innovation Fund. This takes the company’s total funding to date to $11 million, with previous investment led by Connect Ventures. Contingent claims its global customer base has been growing at over 10x, and that its platform is in use by procurement and supply chain teams at a star-studded list of companies, including Monzo, Seagate, Huel, Barratt Developments plc and the U.K. government. |
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Don’t lose sleep over Elon Musk’s desire to build the next Twitter | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | Elon Musk tweeted this weekend that he is “ ” to building his own social media platform. “Given that Twitter serves as the de facto public town square, failing to adhere to free speech principles fundamentally undermines democracy,” the billionaire serial entrepreneur who is CEO of Tesla and Space X . “What should be done?” If your blood pressure spiked reading these tweets, you’re not alone. But let’s take a deep breath. We probably won’t see an app called DogeSociælX any time soon. Musk has a history of tweeting absurd memes, thoughts and even about Tesla, then when U.S. regulators react with more than a raised eyebrow. This isn’t the first time that Musk has fantasized publicly about his dreams of being the next Jack Dorsey (though maybe he’s closer to a Zuck?). After journalists criticized Musk for his questionable Tesla management choices in 2018, he to launch a website called Pravda, the Russian word for “truth,” which is also the name of an historic Russian communist newspaper. Musk’s website would allow the public , editors and media outlets on their “core truth” and “credibility scores.” Thankfully, this idea did not come to fruition, but as all journalists know, Twitter already functions very well as a vehicle to make you aware when people don’t agree with you. Musk's sudden deep and genuine concern about Twitter's fairness "as the de facto town square" is just like his 2018 concerns about media accuracy/objectivity: a deeply hypocritical ploy to shore up his (and his followers) absurd persecution fantasy. — E.W. Niedermeyer (@Tweetermeyer) When Musk’s Twitter-borne ideas do get off the ground, they have traditionally fallen far short of becoming the next SpaceX. Also in 2018 — a big year for his antics — Musk announced his “new ,” a comedy company called Thud (punctuated with an optional exclamation point). After Elon Musk was tapped to host SNL last year, I embarked on a Sisyphean journalistic : I contacted all 13 former employees of Thud, Musk’s forgotten foray into comedy media. No one was willing to talk to me on the record. Powered by former editors of The Onion, Thud flopped, and was then reduced to a conversation starter on a resume (former Theranos employees ). It’s no wonder that these writers and designers didn’t want to revisit Thud, which its now calls “short-lived” and “aptly named.” Initially, Musk funneled into Thud, but he left the company abruptly, leaving its editors with no plan to monetize the project. “Making a swift transition from being a billionaire-backed project to an independent media company is… You know,” editor Cole Bolton The Verge at the time. Given his history of making outlandish statements online for the fun of it, there’s little need to panic about Musk’s sudden interest in creating a social media empire (this one isn’t even intergalactic!). Plus, even when there’s a big name behind a new platform, there’s no guarantee it’ll take off. Donald Trump’s own new app, Truth Social, may feel like it’s poised to become a mainstream 4chan, but , we’re still 976,985th on the waitlist. And once you’re admitted, the party doesn’t appear to be too exciting (unless you’re into “ “). finally got off the waitlist for truth social — kelsey weekman (@kelsaywhat) Even if Musk were to develop his own social media platform, he wouldn’t have the same level of reach he has on Twitter. He boasts 79.4 million followers, landing him solidly in the top 10 most-followed users on the site, beaten out only by figures like Barack Obama and Justin Bieber. But unlike Taylor Swift and Katy Perry, Musk leverages his following to make and Twitter’s to Joseph Stalin. Notably, as Musk complains that he is not allowed to speak freely, these foul tweets were not removed by the platform; he his Hitler meme himself, and the dig at Agrawal is still up. This isn’t a free speech issue; it’s just Musk’s distaste for any form of regulation. It’s doubtful that Musk’s nearly 80 million followers would migrate over to his theoretical new platform, but even if they did, the SEC could still hold Musk accountable for whatever insider information he shares. Musk’s most powerful tool has always been Twitter, and like Trump, he doesn’t seem to gain anything by trying to start a new company that the SEC would still monitor anyway. This isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be concerned about the threat posed by egomaniacal men in power who are wealthy enough to make their fever dreams realities. After all, Musk seems to be a bit better at business than Trump. But sometimes, Musk’s outbursts on Twitter do nothing but create polarizing, charged dialogue, and we forget that even though Musk’s tweets can move markets, sometimes, they simply just fall with a thud. |
Networking with CrunchMatch starts today for TechCrunch Early Stage | Alexandra Ames | 2,022 | 3 | 28 | The ultimate educational experience for aspiring and newly minted founders — also known as — kicks off on April 14 in San Francisco. We can’t wait to see you in person, but you don’t have to wait another minute to tap into the summit’s many opportunities. Starting today, you can get ahead of the networking curve by accessing CrunchMatch. Our AI-powered platform helps you find and schedule meetings with the people who can move your startup dream closer to reality. now at the low early-bird price of $249 — regular price is $449 — to start networking with early-stage founders with CrunchMatch. We expect more than 1,000 attendees at , and while meeting folks is easy, connecting with the people who align with your goals and can help move your business forward is even better. CrunchMatch provides a quick and efficient way to find those proverbial needles in the haystack. You’ll save time and — now that we’re back to real-life events — shoe leather, too. Who’s on your dream networking list — other founders, mentors, marketing mavens, VCs, branding brahmas, crowdfunding kings, expert entrepreneurs? CrunchMatch helps you connect and schedule the meetings that matter most. It’s fast, effective and painless. Don’t just take our word for it. Here’s what Felicia Jackson, inventor and founder of CPRWrap, told us about using CrunchMatch: The CrunchMatch networking platform is such a smart, useful tool. It lets you see who’s there, find the right people and reach out for a meeting. I scheduled five or six appointments in one day. The meetings were small, intimate and very informative. takes place on April 14, and the CrunchMatch platform is officially open for business. Don’t have a ticket yet? , and you’ll have plenty of time — weeks, in fact — to set and vet your meeting requests before you even step foot inside our Pier 27 venue. .
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Why aren’t VCs funding more startups focused on menopause? | Connie Loizos | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | In recent years, “femtech” has attracted increasing attention and venture funding, with dozens of startups springing into existence, from digital health apps to, more newly, regenerative medicine companies. Most of those deals tie to infertility, and it’s easy to appreciate why. Among U.S. women ages 15 to 49 years with no prior births, have difficulty getting pregnant or carrying a pregnancy to term, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. , which impacts half the population and is becoming front of mind as the world’s demographics skew older, owing to, among other things, a shift toward smaller families that began in the late 1960s and an increase in life expectancy. (Between 1980 and 2016, average life expectancy at birth increased from 73.7 to . The numbers suggest opportunity. Indeed, according to recent United Nations , the number of older people in the total population is increasing rapidly. In 2020, there were 727 million persons aged 65 years or over in the world; by 2050, that number is expected to double to 1.5 billion people. It’s why we’re beginning to see a greater range of companies catering to an older demographic, from reverse-mortgage type to senior home care services . Yet menopause — which is clearly an enormous market — continues to attract a trickling of investment dollars. According to Crunchbase data, only a dozen startups that address menopause have attracted funding over the last 12 months. The most recent of these is Vira Health, which offers personalized digital therapeutics for women going through menopause and just this week announced a ($12 million). The deal follows a $10 million round announced last month for HerMD, an outfit aiming to open offline centers focused on women’s sexual health and menopause (it operates two right now). Gameto, a company that aims to delay — even eradicate — menopause through regenerative medicine, meanwhile announced in funding in January. Compared to the dollars being invested elsewhere, often in me-too companies, it’s chump change. It’s even more shocking given that women who are pre-menopausal, menopausal, or post-menopausal tend to be at the height of their spending power. There are plenty of reasons investors might be hesitant, including that many are male and will themselves never . Indeed, most of the companies funded to date have received checks from women VCs. There haven’t been any “breakout” consumer brands catering to women who experience menopause. While some of the most costly investments — the development of hormone replacement therapies — have proven highly remunerative for pharmaceutical companies, they’ve also been plagued with safety concerns, and the path to rolling out new drugs is littered with failure. (Astellas, a Japan-based multinational pharma company, is perhaps the latest to swing and in a phase 3 study in Asia.) Advances in recent years in biology, computing, automation and artificial intelligence are drawing growing interest in menopause from a wide range of stakeholders, including those focusing on regenerative medicine, which is the process of creating living, functional tissues to repair or replace tissue or organ function that is lost. Gameto, for example, which is backed by Future Ventures, hopes to use cell therapies to extend the time before ovaries stop functioning as an organ in order to delay some of the health conditions associated with menopause, including higher blood pressure, heart disease and osteoporosis. (Its CEO believes women deserve a higher quality of life for longer, given they are living longer lives.) There’s growing evidence to suggest there could be more opportunities for treatments. For instance, researchers are only now beginning to realize the impact of menopause on women’s brains. “Many of the symptoms of menopause cannot possibly be directly produced by the ovaries, if you think about the hot flashes, the night sweats, the anxiety, the depression, the insomnia, the brain fog,” Lisa Mosconi, an associate professor of neurology at Weill Cornell Medicine and director of its Women’s Brain Initiative, in July. “Those are brain symptoms, and we should look at the brain as something that is impacted by menopause at least as much as your ovaries are.” As for the lack of breakout consumer brands catering to women who experience menopause — including brands that relieve signs and symptoms and help manage chronic conditions — they could be around the corner. One thing seems certain. It’s an underserved market that’s fast-growing and target-rich. Add in the chance to get behind category-defining brands, and it’s fair to wonder: Why aren’t VCs — and founders, for that matter — more focused on menopause? |
How to hire great engineers when you don’t have any technical expertise | Marcelo Wiermann | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | engineering team can be intimidating, especially for first-time and non-technical founders. I’ve served at multiple startups and established tech companies worldwide, and have hired more than 100 engineers. Recruiting great engineers involves four main challenges: Finding good engineers is a lengthy subject in itself, and there is plenty of information on how to structure offers, so let’s focus on how to engage and assess great candidates. I have identified a few startup-specific tactics that you can apply immediately even if you do not have a technical background. You need to earn the attention of good candidates. Let’s skip the basics like getting an introduction through your network or running engaging LinkedIn and StackOverflow ads. You are targeting the top 25% of engineers, which puts you in direct competition with the best recruiters in the industry. Because engineers are approached by recruiters all the time, they have become wary of them. This gives you an immediate advantage as a founder or startup manager. Think of your opening message as a pitch and make it interesting for them: Talk about the magnitude of the problem you are solving and the impact they could have; tell them about the cutting edge tech you are using, and how they will have the freedom to shape the company’s future. Don’t overdo it, but don’t make it sound like they would be exchanging one cubicle for another, either. Most people you’re reaching out to are probably not looking for a job, so do not approach them with a dry copy-and-pasted invitation to apply. Look at their profiles, which communities they belong to, their interests, skills, backgrounds, who they follow, their GitHub profiles, etc. Personalize your pitch accordingly and tell them why they are an excellent fit for your company — and vice-versa. Poor hiring choices can set a project back by months — even permanently — and generate tons of technical debt. Experienced engineering managers are probably familiar with tech hiring, but non-technical founders and technical founders with no management experience should learn two ground rules first: You also want to answer two fundamental questions: |
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Daily Crunch: $8.5B Amazon-MGM merger will bring thousands of titles to Prime Video | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, March 17, 2022! We have an absolute mountain of news to climb today, so we’re going to get to work with alacrity. A small reminder before we do that . Can’t wait to see everyone IRL! – Bryce Durbin From the outside, a startup that makes multiple pivots might look like it lacks direction. In reality, changing course is usually the smartest bet, because it allows founding teams to leverage new technology and adapt to changing market conditions. Transportation reporter Rebecca Bellan interviewed Tortoise co-founder Dmitry Shevelenko about his company’s transition “from using a hardware-as-a-service model to a take-rate scheme that gives it 10% of any sales made from its card payment-enabled bots.” Pivoting is positive, says Shevelenko. “The most important thing with agility is actually being able to gracefully admit you’re wrong, or that you’ve learned new information and are adapting.” And there was more: Meta is , , and . |
PayPal expands services to allow users to send money to Ukrainians | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | PayPal is expanding its services to allow its users to send money to Ukrainians, the company on Thursday. Prior to this expansion, users in Ukraine could only use PayPal to send money out of the country. The expansion allows Ukrainian PayPal account holders to send and receive payments from friends and family around the world. Ukrainian customers who receive money in their PayPal Wallet will be able to transfer the funds to their bank account by linking an eligible Mastercard or Visa debit or credit card. PayPal also announced that it’s temporarily waiving its fees for customers sending funds to Ukrainian PayPal accounts or receiving funds into Ukrainian PayPal accounts through June 30. Xoom, which is the company’s international remittance service, will also be waiving transaction fees for payments sent to recipients in Ukraine. The announcement from PayPal follows a request from the Ukrainian government asking the payments company to roll out new services that would allow people in the country to receive access to payments. Mykhailo Fedorov, Ukraine’s Vice Prime Minister and Minister of Digital Transformation, applauded the and shared a letter he received from PayPal. Welcome to Ukraine! , , thank you for supporting Ukraine and peace! — Mykhailo Fedorov (@FedorovMykhailo) “Our teams have worked intensively to identify how PayPal could best and quickly provide additional services to Ukrainians,” the letter from PayPal said. “We believe this service with be helpful for people in Ukraine to receive money from their friends and relatives around the world. It will also help Ukrainian refugees in other countries, so they can receive money to use or withdraw in their current location.” Ukrainian customers will be able to send and receive funds from their Ukrainian PayPal Wallet in USD, CAD, GBP and EUR. Once a customer transfers their funds from their PayPal Wallet to an eligible debit or credit card, the money will be available in the currency associated with that card. Today’s announcement comes as PayPal services in Russia earlier this month. PayPal isn’t the only payments company to pull out of the country, as Mastercard and Visa network services in Russia. Since the war began, people have been looking for ways to financially support Ukrainians. Airbnb CEO has said some people around the world have been booking Airbnbs in Ukraine, without the intention to stay in them, to send financial help to hosts in the country. Ukraine has also worth tens of millions of dollars from people looking to aid its war effort against Russia. PayPal’s expanded services will facilitate a more direct way to support Ukrainians. The company says these new services will start to become available today. |
Don’t buy a breach or a bad reputation: A more effective approach to M&A due diligence | David Etue | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | time and energy to integrate networks and applications after an acquisition. However, the acquiring IT, security and intelligence teams rarely have the resources or internal processes to perform investigative diligence on a target before an acquisition. Being able to do so would enable them to better manage risk. Questionnaires, interviews and cyber due diligence are commonly employed, but these efforts are typically only started after a letter of intent (LOI) is in place, and access to the organization and its networks is granted. In many cases, regulatory approvals may delay this access and information sharing even further. What results is a process that is often rushed and suboptimal. As the M&A market accelerates, acquirers must change this dynamic to speed up the due diligence process and ensure any risks associated with cybersecurity posture, company reputation and key personnel are identified, evaluated and addressed early in the process. Here are five key steps to a more timely and effective approach to M&A due diligence: Due to constraints or the rushed nature of traditional diligence, companies often discover risk on day one, when the deal closes. It is possible to understand material risks early in the process through the use of technical and intelligence-driven diligence. It enables you to better evaluate the opportunity and have integration teams equipped to manage accepted risk on day one. You can begin intelligence-driven investigation and evaluation much earlier without needing network access or information sharing. This approach is increasingly being used to validate, or even replace, questionnaires and interviews. The key is to add open source intelligence (OSINT) to the due diligence process. OSINT is based on publicly available information and can include both freely available and licensed sources. By using OSINT and initiating due diligence from “outside the firewall,” acquirers and their enterprise data decision-makers can begin their investigation at any point in the process, including in the target identification phase. Since it doesn’t require information sharing or access to the target’s applications and networks, initial evaluations can also be completed much faster than traditional cyber diligence, often within a period of a couple of weeks. Once an organization decides to enhance its diligence process with OSINT, it is important to identify the individuals or organizations that will manage the process. This depends on the size of the organization, as well as the prevalence and complexity of the risks involved. |
Injectsense collects $1.7M grant for its eye implant smaller than a grain of rice | Emma Betuel | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | If you were to accidentally drop the eye sensor developed by Injectsense, you’d have little chance of finding it. Ariel Cao, the founder and CEO, admits as much. But once it’s been implanted into the back of your eye, it can remain there, basically immobile, for as long as 80 years – all the while transmitting data. Injectsense, a startup founded in 2014, has developed an ocular implant smaller than a grain of rice. That device can measure intraocular pressure – a measure of how much tension is building within your eyeball. Intraocular pressure is a significant risk factor for glaucoma, a disease that causes damage to the optic nerve, and eventually blindness. You’ve probably had your intraocular pressure measured before, and it’s not particularly pleasant. The procedure involves your eye doctor giving you numbing drops, placing your head into a bright microscope, and touching your eye with a device called a tonometer. Injectsense’s implant, by comparison, is designed to wirelessly transmit that data continuously once inserted. “It will collect all the info so you have nothing to do,” Cao told TechCrunch. “You can sit around. You can skydive, hike, do whatever you want.” Injectsense’s device would be delivered into the body using a short, non-surgical procedure. It’s something like an , when a small needle is used to deliver medicine to the back of the eye – you feel pressure, but no puncture pain. The device can be recharged by putting on a pair of accompanying glasses for 5 minutes each week, which also allows the device to download its intraocular pressure readings to the cloud, where an ophthalmologist can review it. The battery, Cao said, can continue in this pattern for 80 years. Based on animal studies and in-vitro data, Injectsense was awarded a two-year small business innovation research (SBIR) grant of $1.7 million by the National Eye Institute in March. That comes on the back of a from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration achieved in 2020. (Breakthrough device designations allow for a slightly faster review process). That combination is suggestive that regulators want to at least see more data on Injectsense’s device. The Injectsense device has only been tested in rabbits so far. A study reviewed by TechCrunch suggested that the devices performed well, though the data hasn’t been peer-reviewed. There were no ocular issues in the animals, and the devices were successfully implanted. This new grant will pave the way for more animal and bench testing at the Johns Hopkins Wilmer Eye Institute this year. Those tests will also inform a human pilot study in Chile also scheduled for this year. Cao said the team selected Chile for human trials for three reasons: lower overall cost, an experienced review board at the Centro de la Visión in Santiago, and specifically to work with Juan Jose Mura Castro, an ophthalmologist there. Measuring intraocular pressure might not feel like an especially flashy application of injectable technology when the likes of Neuralink is in the headlines. But the device’s simplicity is both personal and pragmatic. Cao’s inspiration for working in the glaucoma space comes from his own experience with his late father, who suffered from the disease. It’s not an uncommon story: Glaucoma is the second leading cause of blindness worldwide, and the of blindness in the U.S., where it affects about . Worldwide, glaucoma cases are to increase from 57.5 million to over 111.8 million by 2040. When it comes to combating glaucoma, measuring pressure is useful. Numerous scientific studies have shown that intraocular pressure is a factor for glaucoma. It’s not the only risk factor, and not all people with glaucoma have elevated intraocular pressure, but it is still considered the . The Injectsense leadership team. Injectsense The big question with any implantable device is: What’s to be gained by actually putting a sensor in the body? If we can already simply measure intraocular pressure with tools eye doctors already have, why upgrade to something so technical? Cao’s argument is that measuring intraocular pressure during clinic visits misses key fluctuations in pressure that scientists know happen within the eye. But because we don’t measure those fluctuations routinely in most people, we could be missing potential avenues for care. That argument, to some extent, has been echoed by research. While it’s possible, though cumbersome, to measure intraocular pressure regularly during the day, measuring these changes at night is difficult. And, data has suggested that at night, intraocular pressure does fluctuate, . For instance, measured intraocular pressure in 24 patients with early-stage glaucoma every two hours. The study says that patients were “awakened if necessary,” but it’s hard to imagine not being awakened by someone opening and touching your eye. The study found that the glaucoma patients had different patterns of intraocular pressure depending on the time of night compared to healthy controls. For instance, between 5:30 and 7 a.m., their intraocular pressure increased, while the control group’s pressure declined. The authors go on to state that this “phase delay” could be relevant to their glaucoma diagnoses, but they don’t expand on why that might be the case. And, they advise that intraocular pressure measurement in the clinician’s office “is probably not adequate for the optimal management of glaucoma.” Cao argues that continuous sensing could provide a picture of how these changes affect glaucoma progression. “We keep looking at clinical studies and research, and they keep telling everybody that the fluctuations [in pressure], or night pressure, is important,” he said. “The night pressure is important because when you lower the blood pressure, the intraocular pressure goes up. “So say you will have a heart condition and glaucoma, you never want to take your drug before going to bed because you lower your [blood] pressure and you spike your [intraocular pressure] in the middle of the night.” Injectsense’s technology already exists in a viable form factor, but there’s still a lot of work to do. Remember, Injectsense is still in animal trials, so these big ideas still have a ways to go before they’re ready for FDA review. The company has raised $15 million so far and is in the process of raising a Series C round. Investors include Large Ophthalmic Strategic and Revelation partners, as well as several undisclosed investors. |
Flickr is paywalling the ability to upload NSFW photos | Amanda Silberling | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | Flickr isn’t very good at making money, but as the old adage goes, sex sells. So, in Honestly, it’s not a bad move — it might be more effective than to recruit their friends to pay for Flickr. When SmugMug the photo-hosting service in 2018, CEO Don MacAskill hoped to make the service profitable, calling it “ .” But this wasn’t just hyperbolic CEO-speak — MacAskill had a point. Flickr is a historical archive. For one thing, it showcases actual historical images, but it also chronicles a visual history of the world through the lens of millions of people since 2004. It would be sad if that were all to disappear. But Flickr is very expensive to run because it hosts so much data on the internet. For a while, there wasn’t much of a reason to pay for Flickr, since all users had a free terabyte of storage for their photos. But under SmugMug’s management, Flickr instituted a limit on how many photos free users could store, knocking down that terabyte of data to just 1,000 photos. Flickr also warned users that after a certain date, their photos . These major changes were implemented to encourage users to save their personal archives by upgrading to a paid plan. So far, Flickr it hasn’t actually deleted any uploads (thank you, Flickr, but also, this means I wasted an afternoon in 2019 downloading zip files of everything I ever posted). But it’s still not making money, hence the pivot to inviting NSFW uploads. In less sexy news, Flickr is continuing to limit what users can do with their free accounts. Today’s announcement also states that now, free users can only post 50 non-public photos. “We love being entrusted with your photos — but we love seeing them get discovered, added to groups and submitted to photo competitions even more,” Seville explained. “We’d never turn you away if you just want a safe place to store a lifetime’s worth of images, you’ll just need a Pro membership to do so.” Flickr says it will keep free users updated about how and when these updates will affect their accounts. But this market Flickr is targeting to boost its subscription revenue is a very specific one: people who upload private photos (but no more than 1,000 of them) and NSFW photographers. Here’s to hoping that nude photography can save this slice of the internet. |
4 eVTOL trends moving the air taxi industry closer to takeoff | Ben Tigner | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | if you hadn’t previously heard of eVTOLs (electric vertical takeoff and landing aircraft), they might have made their way onto your radar last year. Between the billions of dollars in capital, SPACs and test flights, there were countless companies touting their newest developments and technological milestones bringing us one step closer to the commercialization of air taxis. The billions of dollars raised by eVTOL companies last year mean one thing for 2022 — massive growth. I’ve been working in the aircraft development space for decades, but 2021 was different. I’m keeping my eye on four trends for the next two years that will drastically change the way these companies operate and influence how interested entrepreneurs and investors can participate in the development of the burgeoning eVTOL ecosystem. This one is a bit of a no-brainer, but this is a hot space, and every eVTOL vehicle developer is going to try to differentiate itself as much as possible. This will create a heightened competitive landscape among these companies, as well as future operators and infrastructure and service providers. However, this is a good thing. Given the large addressable market of urban air mobility and the lead times required to stand up such a complex operation, the diversification and competition will benefit the entire space, as opposed to just one or two companies. As an investor, I would be keeping a solid eye on companies that consider what urban air mobility will look like in reality as opposed to experimental prototypes. When I say reality, I’m talking about some degree of scale and maturity — commercial eVTOLs flying paying riders at scale in a long-term market. Unlike commercial jets, which are indistinguishable to the average airline passenger, most eVTOLs have strikingly different designs. What performance differences will result from these design differences? What economic factors will be important as the industry scales once the glitz and glamour of early demonstration flights have passed? Why will riders and operators choose certain eVTOLs over others? At this point, experimental prototypes pay little attention to real-world demands like payload and weather condition reliability, but if riders are going to save time getting to the airport for a long-distance flight, they need to be able to bring their luggage, and they need to count on the eVTOL to fly in the same weather conditions that jets do. |
The gyms have reopened, but investors are still betting on Hydrow’s home rower | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | The home fitness craze has, predictably, died down somewhat since the height of pandemic-fueled buying sprees. Category leader Peloton is (among lots of other things) in a major way. Still, connected fitness predates COVID-19, and it will (knock on wood) be here after the pandemic ends. Plenty of investors are still bullish on the category, which — like the work from home movement — still has life in it left. It also seems likely that while Peloton’s woes have scrambled the industry’s North Star, companies like Hydrow may ultimately benefit from those struggles. For one thing, it opens the field up to more players — and perhaps more importantly, no one is talking about the rumored Peloton home rowing machine anymore. That’s no doubt been a collective sigh from the company and competitors like and . Given Peloton’s ramped-up production capacity and the amount of money it’s already spent on content, it was well positioned to take the world of home rowers by storm. Boston-based Hyrdow this week is getting a robust vote of confidence from investors, in the form of a $55 million Series D (or, “approximately” $55 million, per the language in a release). Founder and CEO Bruce Smith uses the word “hybrid” in the release, which may well be a concession that home devices are destined to play a part of a larger workout that once again includes gyms. Hydrow “As more and more people embrace a hybrid approach to fitness, we continue to see extraordinary adoption, and our top priority is ensuring we can keep meeting that demand,” the executive says in a release. “This latest round of funding will not only allow us to do that, but will give us the opportunity to further invest in our product offering and drive innovation, so we can continue to deliver a best-in-class experience for our members.” There’s room for growth here, certainly. Home rowers don’t have the saturation of treadmills or bikes, but by all accounts still offer a solid full body workout. Another point in their favor in the home setting is that they can be stored with (relatively) little space compared to treadmills. The company notes that it grew revenue 3x between 2020 and 2021 and now has north of 200,000 users. Of course, growth in that timeframe is likely not sustainable long term, given the current regression, but it’s a great starting point for a company bursting onto the scene. The round was led by Constitution Capital and features L Catterton, RX3, Liberty Street, Activant Capital and Sandbridge Capital. It will be used to ramp up production and expand Hydrow’s international footprint. |
Elden Ring made me a FromSoftware believer | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | latest game in the storied tradition of punishing, mysterious titles by developer FromSoftware, following fiercely loved hits like the Dark Souls series and Bloodborne. I’ve wanted to love these games for a long time. I’ve followed the releases, watched precision speedruns and read treatises on their intricate level design. But something didn’t click. Not for lack of trying, some combination of the bleak aesthetic, boringly elitist community (enjoying a popular video game franchise is not a personality!) and relatively on-rails gameplay experience put me off. I hoped Elden Ring would be different, that its unique blend of roving exploration and enticing esoterica would finally capture my attention. So far it’s delivered and then some. Since Elden Ring launched a few weeks ago, I’ve been slowly picking my way through its rolling hills and spooky marshes, nudging the story forward here and there. Because I wasn’t convinced I’d wind up sticking with the game past the first few hours, I uncharacteristically crashed through the character creator instead of agonizing for hours over what class to pick, settling on the confessor, a sort of grim nun with a penchant for pyromancy. Forty-plus hours later, I’m alternately resisting my deranged urge to spoil Elden Ring’s obscure secrets and savoring the game’s long, slow journey. It’s a blast. As a longtime JRPG and MMO player, my favorite games tend to have big, colorful environments. Life is dreary enough as is and I’m generally hesitant to spend too much time in bleak, colorless worlds. Elden Ring doesn’t break continuity with the visual style of From’s other games, but the world is beautiful, expansive and grand more often than it is oppressive (giant ants notwithstanding, fuck those ants). The game is littered with musty medieval dungeons and cramped mines, but at any given time you can pop back out into the overworld and watch the sun set. The juxtaposition between the vast, often evocative open world and the tense, interior parts of the game makes the latter digestible for someone like me who tends to get a little twitchy when I spend too much time indoors in games. Double indoors — that’s no good! If you’ve thought about playing Elden Ring but you’re hesitant, or if the game’s reputation for being hard is putting you off, know that there are lots of ways to mitigate the challenge. For one, you can just grind away, killing small enemies and overleveling enough to make the next dragon-handed monstrosity you meet a bit more manageable. If you’re hitting the wall, you can also switch your play style, tossing magical beams at range instead of chipping away up close with whatever massive, rusty implement of destruction you’ve been swinging around. There’s also stealth, archery, agility-focused builds, weapons that inflict status effects and faith — a sort of parallel path to traditional magic that unlocks stuff like dragon incantations, healing spells and a lot of cool utility options. If all else fails you can go old school and pick up a big ass sword and shield and make that work. In spite of my initial less than stellar build (dex/faith/mistakes), figuring out a play style is a lot of fun, even though you’ll be stomped, gored and magicked to death many, many times in the process. The combat system is so deep and varied that I keep experimenting with new weapons rather than getting good with any one thing. That process is a game unto itself. Bandai Namco/FromSoftware I started the game with a one-handed sword, faith-based magic and a dowdy habit-looking set of armor. Many hours later, I find myself mostly playing more like a religiously fervent version of X-Men’s Wolverine, gruesome claws aglow. At some point along the way I picked up a katana, a choice I recommend to anyone in any context, and a frosty axe that lets me freeze enemies around me with ice crystals. And that’s only scratching the surface. Much like Monster Hunter, a series I really fell for over the last couple of years, switching among any of these weapons totally changes how the game feels. It’s a lot of fun! Elden Ring is actually many, many games in one and that’s a boon for anyone hesitant to dive into their first FromSoftware title. You don’t have to be a diehard fan of the developer for this game and its infamous combat to click for you, especially if you’re willing to experiment. Personally, I don’t have enough gaming time to I prefer to life is short and I have a lot of other interests! Happily, Elden Ring offers okay to unskilled players like myself a whole toolkit for turning on easy mode when we just don’t give a shit enough not to. That includes everything from obscure leveling shortcuts like killing a somnolent dragon in cold blood (Thanks, YouTube! Sorry, dragon!) to summoning AI-powered ghost buddies to bail you out or relying on ranged magic attacks instead of bashing things in the face. When all else fails, you can summon another human player and hope they’re not just popping into your game to teach you a harsh lesson about self-reliance. Of course, no matter how many helpful difficulty hacks you toggle on, this is still a hard game and playing it at all will be a time commitment that plenty of casual gamers just won’t be able to take on. That’s ok! Credit: Bandai Namco/FromSoftware If you’ve not played yet, Elden Ring is a Very Big Game that has all the makings of the next Skyrim, an experience epic and detailed enough that people continued to dip back into it for a decade. Elden Ring is also as open a game as you could hope for, but that alone isn’t quite what makes it special. Once a novelty, open world games are a corporate formula at this point, allowing companies like Ubisoft to crank out massive, cookie-cutter games one after the other. As a longtime Assassin’s Creed player, those games are like sweatpants for me — mindless, never particularly challenging but with fun, comfortable combat and enough exploration to be interesting. Elden Ring is a very different experience and both types of games have their places. By law, any conversation about open world games must dedicate at least one paragraph to Breath of the Wild, 2017’s Zelda mega-hit that raised the bar for vast, thoughtfully designed worlds. And by law, any gamer must spent upward of 100 hours exploring Hyrule and loving every minute of it — as I did dutifully. Incredible as it is though, Breath of the Wild’s siren song faltered a bit once I’d traveled to the far corners of the map and figured out that there weren’t exciting secrets at the top of every towering peak (more often, it was just another korok seed). Bandai Namco/FromSoftware For as big, interactive and delightful as that game is, exploring Elden Ring’s haunted landscape is on a whole different level. FromSoftware rewards exploration handsomely, doling out a wonderful variety of strange interactions, hidden treasures, secret zones, power ups and completely optional boss fights for the explorer intrepid enough to push beyond. FromSoftware’s human touch is on full display here and every little secret sprinkled in feels like a human person engineered exactly how that moment would unfold rather than just blasting waypoints onto a map out of a T-shirt cannon, a la Ubisoft. More than 40 hours in, Elden Ring is just beginning to reveal its true scope. The map is expanding outward, but I keep remembering weird little mysteries I want to investigate and areas I wanted to sneak into underleveled, so I’m going backward as often as forward. Because the game is so open and save points are so generous, you can easily dedicate your hours in Elden Ring to doing whatever you want, whether that’s clearing previously impossible bosses or delving for secrets at the map’s farthest reaches. Or I might just ride my spectral horse through the plains and watch the sun slip below the horizon, clouds looming like so much beautiful, ominous sorbet. I may get trampled into dust by a mechanized giant wielding a fire sword the size of a school bus, but that’s okay. I can just bounce back up and do it all again — or do something else. |
Meta to test new tools to give brands control over ad placement on its platforms later this year | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | Meta, formerly known as Facebook, says it will begin testing new content tools designed to give advertisers control over where their ads are shown on Facebook and Instagram feeds, the company on Thursday. The tools will allow companies to prevent their ads from being placed next to unsuitable content, such as posts about politics, tragedy or violence. The company will begin testing the new content controls in the second half of this year and plans to officially roll them out in early 2023. Meta says it will primarily focus on English-speaking markets for the testing phase. Over the course of the next year, Meta will expand the controls to include ads placed within stories, video feeds, Instagram’s explore page and more. Meta also plans to eventually expand the controls to additional languages. “Across Meta, we are designing suitability controls to give advertisers control over where their ads are shown,” Meta said in a about the announcement. “We previously announced our commitment to build content-based suitability controls to address concerns that advertisers have of their ads appearing adjacent to content that is not suitable for their brand preferences. We have been working closely with GARM (Global Alliance for Responsible Media) as we develop these controls, which will be aligned with the GARM Suitability Framework.” Meta also announced that it’s partnering with Zefr, a platform that enables companies to measure brand suitability, to monitor and report the context in which ads appear on Facebook. The company will work to verify that ads only appear next to suitable content. Meta and Zefr will begin small-scale testing in the third quarter of this year. The new tools will be Meta’s response to growing demands from advertisers who have for more control over their ad placements online in order to ensure they aren’t displayed next to unfavorable content. The company has worked to address these concerns in the past. In November, it would expand News Feed controls for advertisers that run ads in English and give them access to “Topic Exclusion Controls.” The three topics are news and politics, social issues, and crime and tragedy. When an advertiser selects one of these topics, their ad will not be shown to people who have recently engaged with these topics. At the time, Meta had said it’s aware that this tool may not address all of the concerns that advertisers have and promised to develop content-based controls in the future. Facebook’s algorithms are notorious for promoting inflammatory content and . Given that, Meta is under mounting regulatory pressure to clean up the platform and make its practices more transparent. The modern news cycle and online advertising landscape has made it difficult for brands to avoid having their ads placed next to unsuitable content. Since most companies purchase ads by creating an ad and submitting it to Meta’s ad auction, they don’t have control over ad placement, but these upcoming tools should change that. |
Following suicides and lawsuits, Snapchat restricts apps building on its platform with new policies | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | After a bullied , a grieving mother last year the platform where the abuse had taken place — Snapchat — for not doing enough to protect its younger users. Another , related , followed last month. In response to the former, Snap the anonymous messaging apps that had facilitated online bullying and vowed to revamp its policies to address what sort of Snapchat-connected experiences could be built using its developer tools. Today, the company announced the results of its policy review and the changes it’s making. Effective immediately for new developers building on its Snap Kit platform, Snap is banning anonymous messaging apps and will require anyone building friend-finding apps to limit those apps to users 18 and up. Existing developers are being given 30 days to come into compliance with the new policies. These changes are limited to third-party apps integrated with Snapchat and are not intended to address other child safety issues on Snap’s platform. Snap says the policy update will impact a small subset of their community of over 1,500 developers. Only around 2% of developers will be impacted by the prohibition on anonymous messaging apps, while another 3% will be impacted by the new requirement to age-gate their apps. The company also noted that developers who remove anonymous messaging from their apps can have their apps re-reviewed and remain a Snap Kit partner. One app that greatly benefited from the on anonymous messaging apps YOLO and LMK, , is among those that will need to make changes in order to continue to work with Snapchat. In a matter of months following the bans, Sendit had gained millions more downloads from teens who still wanted a way to post anonymous Q&As. The draw of anonymous social apps is unquestionable, especially for young people. But over the years, time and again, it’s been proven that such apps cannot be used responsibly –but can result in devastating consequences. From the to the to the unfortunately well-funded anonymous apps like and ( lasted), anonymity in the hands of young people has been tested and consistently failed. Considering this history, it was arguably irresponsible to permit this sort of activity on Snapchat in the first place, given its core demographic of teens and young adults. In addition to the anonymous messaging ban, Snap will also now limit friend-finding apps to adult users ages 18 and up. Friend-finding apps are designed to connect users with strangers on Snapchat, can encourage people to , and are a avenue for , vulnerable Snapchat users. Often, the apps are used for dating purposes or sexting, not “ -finding,” and can be with porn bots. , and child safety experts have warned about child predators on Snapchat and friend-finding apps as Issues with these apps continue today. For example, an investigation published last month by The Times detailed the rampant sexual abuse and racism taking place on . “As a platform that works with a wide range of developers, we want to foster an ecosystem that helps apps protect user safety, privacy and well-being while unlocking product innovation for developers and helping them grow their businesses,” a Snap spokesperson said in reference to the policy updates. “We believe we can do both, and will continue to regularly evaluate our policies, monitor app compliance, and work with developers to better protect the well-being of our community.” While the changes impact third-party apps integrating with Snapchat, the company has yet to address child safety issues on its platform through something like an age-gated experience for minors, similar to TikTok, or through the launch its parental controls, which Instagram and TikTok now have. However, the company, whose app is rated 13+, has restricted the visibility and findability of minors’ profiles, provides tools and reminders to maintain your friend list, requires mutual friending before messaging (if under 18), and provides links to safety resources, like mental health lines. Despite those efforts, today’s changes come ahead of what’s still a lot more work to be done in terms of child safety. Platform safety is already top of mind for social media companies industry-wide as regulatory pressure heats up. In its case, Snap was last fall to answer lawmakers’ questions over various safety issues impacting minors and young adults using its app, including the prevalence of and that’s inappropriate for Snapchat’s younger teenage users but not blocked by an age gate. alongside Meta by another family that lost their child to suicide after she succumbed to pressure to send sexually explicit photos that were later leaked among her classmates. The states that Snapchat’s lack of verification of the child’s age and its use of disappearing messages contributed to her death. In addition, the suit mentions how anonymous messaging played a role, though it doesn’t directly reference the use of third-party anonymous apps. In the same month, Snap with its friend recommendation feature to make it harder for drug dealers to connect with teens on the app. The problem had been the subject of that connected Snapchat with the sale of fentanyl-laced pills that had killed teens and young adults in over a dozen states. Prior to that, the company for its “speed filter” that let users take photos that showed how fast they were going. The filter contributed to numerous , , and over the years. It was later . (Snap declined to comment on this matter because litigation is pending.) Now that lawmakers are finally looking to rein in the Wild West days of Big Tech, where growth and engagement were consistently prioritized over user safety, Snap has been preparing to make changes. It Jacqueline Beauchere, in September. Snap CEO Evan Spiegel in October also said the company . These tools — which would follow the launch of parental controls on and, — will allow parents to see who their teens are talking to on the app. Snap hasn’t said if the tools will address parents’ other concerns — including a way for parents to disable the child’s access to sending or receiving disappearing messages, restrict friend requests or require approvals, block the child from sharing photos and other media, or hide the adult-oriented (and often clickbait-y) content that features prominently in the app’s Discover section. “We want to help provide ways for parents and teens to partner together to ensure their safety and well-being online — similar to the ways parents help prepare their kids in real life,” a Snap spokesperson said of the parental controls. “We hope that these new tools will serve as a conversation starter between parents and their teens about how to be safe online.” The company said its initial suite of parental controls is on track for a launch this year. The developer policy changes are live now. |
How Chicago is changing who raises early-stage venture capital | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | cover the venture capital industry, two narratives are ubiquitous: There’s the story of how much capital has been invested of late; you’ve — 2020 and 2021 set nearly every record around the world for private-market investment. The other story that pops up, again and again, is the one noting slim or negative progress in venture capitalists investing in more diverse founders. The pervasive nature of the latter story makes it all the more exasperating to report on. The data neatly showcase this massive problem; why haven’t things changed? But there’s some cause for cautious optimism. The Exchange has been collecting data on the Midwest venture capital scene lately, with a special focus on the Chicago area. Thanks to data from , a venture capital firm with a Midwest geographic focus, collected by Chicago-based , and interviews with a number of local investors and founders, a tale emerges that it is possible to change the ratio when it comes to venture investment. Easy? No. Possible? Yes. And worth doing? Definitely. To better understand what’s going on in Chicago and the larger Midwest, we spoke with , the executive director of , a P33 project; the founder and CEO of and the co-founder of and , a co-founder at and a partner at . Let’s start with M25 data on how they are finding it possible to invest in more diverse founders in their region, and then narrow our lens to how Chicago’s numbers are shifting. Then, we’ll bring in notes from active players that are working to keep the industry changing. M25 invests around the Midwest but is based in Chicago. The firm released an update to its regular diversity report series recently, which piqued our curiosity. Why? Because the firm doesn’t just report investments — it provides a look into how those investments came to be. |
To Servi man | Brian Heater | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | effect of writing this newsletter is getting an influx of responses when I write on a specific topic. Last week it was agtech. I expressed a bit of disappointment in the category. So many robotics firms have either failed or been acquired. That’s just kind of how it goes, here in robotics startupland, but there’s so much room for potential in the category. The seeds have been planted, it’s time to harvest. John Deere is well positioned to corner the market, through it’s own footprint/brand recognition, in-house research and a bunch of acquisitions. But come on, folks, it’s food. I eat, you eat it. Farmers grown it, our bodies break it down and convert it into energy. Building blocks of life, people. You know the food pyramid? Everyone talks about grains this, fats that. Thing is, the whole thing is good. There’s a lot of room for innovation, and many or most of the essential pieces are there: autonomous driving (in a far less risky setting than a city street), computer vision, machine learning, soft robotics grippers. Labor is in short supply and the average age of an American farmer is hovering around 58 years. I’ve been getting a number of pitches after last week’s Actuator, and it’s great to see this stuff being deployed in fields for testing. Iron OX One piece of the puzzle I’ve probably not given enough column space to is greenhouses. puts the total acres of U.S. greenhouse farming at 1,228,000. And, frankly, when it comes to greenhouse growing, the United States lags behind other markets, including the Netherlands, which has led the way for a few decades now. Like vertical farming, there are a number of reasons to be excited about the future of greenhouses, including sustainability and food security. And unlike many vertical farms, greenhouses draw direct energy from the sun. While it’s true the category is a drop in the bucket compared to more traditional farming, I would be keeping a very close eye on things were I a roboticist. Remember that thing I said about having fewer potential risks deploying autonomy on a farm versus a city street? Well, greenhouses are an extremely controlled environment — something akin to the warehouse fulfillment category, in many cases with even fewer humans to navigate around. Iron Ox has received the most column ink (and raised a ton of money) in the category. The company’s wheeled robots pick up and move trays of greens to address their needs, while a robotic arm harvest the crops. Other names include MetoMotion, which has developed a robotic picker. The Israeli firm IUNU Earlier this week, I wrote about IUNU. It’s not a great name — or even a particularly good one. It’s pronounced “you knew” somehow, and the startup’s former “iUNU” stylization is now “IUNU,” all of which isn’t particularly helped by the fact that it has a robot named “LUNA.” That said, LUNA is pretty neat, effectively running along a track on a greenhouse ceiling to get a bird’s eye view of how plants are growing — and save farmers a lot of extra steps in the process. That, coupled with some of these picking robots paint a picture of more fully autonomous greenhouses in the future, if that’s a route owners are looking to go. Meantime, . “This round of investment reflects the confidence institutional investors have in us,” CEO Adam Greenberg says in a release. “The conversation around autonomous growing has accelerated in the past year, and we’re proud to be leading the way on this front.” This week, the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI) . A couple of facts are relevant to our interests here. Quoting some bullets directly from an HAI blog post: No shock, really, about the rate of interest — or money — but after covering the whole Huawei situation closely for the past several years, it’s nice to see American and Chinese research facilities working together here. Miso Robotics Meanwhile, over in Miso Robotics, Flippy and Sippy meet Chippy. . Bear Robotics continues to ride high on funding interest amid ongoing staffing shortages. The restaurant robotics company . “Having started my own restaurant years ago, I learned firsthand just how hard things could get,” says founder/CEO John Ha. “I thought there must be a way to automate some of these repetitive tasks without losing what makes a restaurant great. That’s why we created Servi. It’s a solution meant to enhance the experience of customers, employees, and operators. While others are trying to fully automate work, we’re trying to elevate the future of work for stakeholders in this industry that keep it going each day.” Bear Robotics Bear says its Servi robot has thus far delivered 28 million meals over a combined 335,000 miles. We covered Third Wave Automation’s last year. This week, the Bay Area firm , the TWA Reach. It’s the first product resulting from a partnership with forklift maker, Clark. Per the companies, “The automated truck is most suitable for those warehouses and distribution centers looking to improve overall pallet movement productivity and operator efficiency in and around existing racking.” If you haven’t spent a lot of time around warehouses, you might be shocked by how common forklift accidents are. OSHA puts the number at 34,900 serious accidents, 61,800 non-serious and 85 deaths each year in the U.S. alone. Intuition Robotics At long last, the is finally available from Intuition Robotics. It’s been several years of beta testing and multiple funding rounds since we first saw the little robot in action, and now it’s finally available. The product is designed for older users who are still able to live independently, but might need a little assist. It runs $250 upfront and $30 a month. Over in car land, Ford wins with a robot arm designed to operate a Carbon 3D printer. As noted in our piece, robots have been helping build Ford cars for a long time now. This latest application uses KUKA robots to print small batches of custom parts, including things like a brake line bracket for Mustang Shelby GT500. They’re hoping to scale things up — but, then, so is everyone in 3D printing land. Diamond Age I suppose you could say Diamond Age has scaled things up in a more literal sense. The company uses its own combination of robot arms and additive manufacturing to 3D print houses. After a recent $8 million raise, it just added . “Affordable housing is impacting people on a global scale. As the average age for first-time homebuyers has moved from mid-twenties to mid-thirties, there’s an increased demand for more rental property — forcing the entire hierarchy of renters into a more competitive market for ‘quality’ housing,” says co-founder/CEO Jack Oslan. “Helping the next generation of homebuyers get into their first house faster helps the entire ecosystem of housing.” MIT CSAIL We’ve got an old friend returning to close us out this week. MIT CSAIL’s Mini Cheetah recently learned to run a lot faster. Says the team: At the heart of artificial intelligence research is the tradeoff between what the human needs to build in (nature) and what the machine can learn on its own (nurture). The traditional paradigm in robotics is that humans tell the robot both what task to do and how to do it. The problem is that such a framework is not scalable, because it would take immense human engineering effort to manually program a robot with the skills to operate in many diverse environments. A more practical way to build a robot with many diverse skills is to tell the robot what to do and let it figure out the how. Our system is an example of this. In our lab, we’ve begun to apply this paradigm to other robotic systems, including hands that can pick up and manipulate many different objects. Bryce Durbin/TechCrunch |
Tile launches its anti-stalking safety feature in its mobile app | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | Lost-item tracker and AirTag competitor Tile is today its first anti-stalking safety feature, called “Scan and Secure.” The technology was first in October with a promised arrival date of sometime in early 2022. Using Tile’s mobile app, users will now be able to scan for unknown Tiles or Tile-enabled devices that may be traveling with them. The company notes that users don’t have to be Tile owners or a part of Tile’s finding network in order to leverage the new technology — it’s accessible to anyone across both iOS and Android. To use Scan and Secure, users will need to be on the latest version of the Tile app. They’ll also need to have Bluetooth, Location or Location Services, and Precise Location set to On on their mobile device. Tile says users will be prompted within the mobile app if they need to change these or any other settings in order for the feature to work. Tile After updating, new users will then be able to tap the new Scan icon at the top right corner of the app’s Sign In screen to access the feature. Existing users can also reach Scan and Secure via the app’s Settings. The scan process doesn’t offer a precision finding tool that will allow people to locate a Tile device that’s close to them. Instead, Tile notes that users will have to walk or even drive a certain distance away from their original location to work. The full scan can take up to 10 minutes of uninterrupted time to complete and deliver the most accurate results, Tile . It won’t work if you’re just walking around in your home or in a crowded place, like on public transportation, where it could detect other Tiles nearby. The results of the scan will be displayed in the app when complete, which Tile advises users could save to give to law enforcement. The company notes that users may want to run multiple scans to eliminate the possibility of devices that had briefly passed by during a scan versus those that were actually traveling with them. It also suggests using the images in the scan to try to locate the devices by how they look. Unfortunately, without precision-finding capabilities, it’s likely that some users will have a hard time locating well-hidden devices. Tile The company says it will work with law enforcement through court orders to identify the owners of devices that have been used in criminal activities, like stalking. Tile’s Scan and Secure feature is not as comprehensive as the set of tools that are available from Apple for AirTag safety. After numerous stories about AirTags being used for stalking — and even carjacking — its AirTags and Find My network with enhanced warnings and alerts. These included a warning to would-be stalkers that Apple can identify them and share that data with law enforcement, as well as more detailed, proactive alerts for potential stalking victims. And Apple said it would allow users to locate AirTags traveling with them using precision-finding capabilities and louder alerts through later updates, updated its documentation, and will make it possible to find devices that have had their speakers disabled. Scan and Secure is rolling out to Tile mobile app users gradually over the next couple of weeks but will be accessible to everyone on iOS and Android, with or without a Tile account. The company noted it consulted with safety experts on the new functionality, who advised that allowing users to initiate a scan themselves would be a useful feature — particularly because nearly 70% of stalking victims know their abuser. Many are even their victim’s partner. “If someone is a victim of domestic abuse and they are preparing to leave their partner, for example, it’s helpful to be able to choose the time and place that’s safest for them to proactively check if there is a device on them that could track their location,” said Erica Olsen, director for the National Network to End Domestic Violence’s Safety Net Project. “Putting the control in their hands is an important part of increasing safety,” she said. Privacy concerns unrelated to stalking issues have plagued Tile in recent months, after reports indicated that Tile’s new parent company, Life360, was customer data to a location broker. After the investigation, Life360 it would end the practice. Tile said it will continue to work with other experts and advocacy groups to further develop its safety features over time. |
Android 13 makes push notifications opt-in | Frederic Lardinois | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | Android development these days runs on a monthly cadence, so it’s no surprise that about a month after Google announced the first developer preview of Android 13 (code-named “Tiramisu,” as Google calls it in its developer documentation) it has now launched the second developer preview. These previews typically still have a lot of rough edges and are , so like with the first preview, there is no over-the-air installation option (though if you installed the first preview, you will get the second as an over-the-air update). Google has made available for the Pixel 6 Pro, Pixel 6, Pixel 5a 5G, Pixel 5, Pixel 4a (5G), Pixel 4a, Pixel 4 XL and Pixel 4, as well as the Android Emulator. While the first preview gave us a bit of a glimpse of the user experience in Android 13, today’s update mostly focuses on developer features. Google The one exception here is that users will definitely notice that apps will now have to ask for permission to send you notifications (though while Google highlights this today, this has been of Android 13 for a while). Just like with other permissions, apps now have to ask you if they can send notifications and this is an opt-in process. If you’ve ever installed an app that then immediately sends you a plethora of notifications, you’ll love this. Developers, on the other hand, will have to make sure they give plenty of control and context for users to get them to opt in. Talking about permissions, developers can now also downgrade their apps’ permissions when they don’t need them anymore. Android 13 will feature a new API that lets them easily do this. The new version of the operating system will also introduce a new feature that ensures that apps won’t be able to receive messages from other apps unless that’s something the developer explicitly wants. Also new in this preview is support for the MIDI 2.0 standard (musicians rejoice), which will now allow you to connect MIDI 2.0 hardware to Android devices over USB, as well as support for Bluetooth LE Audio, which will bring features like the ability to share and broadcast audio to others, as well as subscriptions to public broadcasts for information and accessibility — and, as the name implies — it’ll use less power. Android 13 will also support vector fonts that adhere to the COLRv1 format and Google is moving its system emoji to this format as well. Since these are vectors, their file sizes are smaller and can be rendered at any size without getting pixelated. COLRv1 vector emoji (left) and bitmap emoji. Google For those using non-Latin scripts, Android 13 now improves the display of languages like Tamil, Burmese, Telugu and Tibetan by adapting the line height for each language to prevent clipping. And for those who use phonetic lettering input methods for languages like Japanese and Chinese, Android 13 now introduces a new so a Japanese user could type in Hiragana and immediately see Kanji search results live, skipping over today’s more convoluted four-step process. |
Paradigm and a16z back Ethereum scaling startup Optimism at $1.65B valuation | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | Throughout the most recent crypto bull run, plenty of new crypto users have interacted with the Ethereum network for the first time and have been surprised to find sluggish, expensive transactions. While the Ethereum blockchain has been very much central to the idea of a web3 crypto internet, the blockchain itself has had trouble keeping up with user demand. This has pushed some founders to build competing blockchains on entirely unique infrastructure, while others in the developer community are focusing their resources on building modular blockchain solutions that sit on top of Ethereum, bundling transactions faster and cheaper while keeping a record of the movements on the central chain. Most blockchain developers believe these “Layer 2” (L2) solutions are the future of how Ethereum will meet the needs of a rapidly growing network, and venture capitalists have been rushing to stake claims on scaling solution products that they believe could be the central interface for how users interact with decentralized apps, mint NFTs and move money around. Several of these startups have raised at unicorn valuations this year. One such scaling startup, , has found new backing from Silicon Valley’s most high-profile crypto investors — Paradigm and Andreessen Horowitz. The Ethereum scaling startup tells TechCrunch they’ve closed a $150 million Series B funding round co-led by Andreessen Horowitz and Paradigm at a $1.65 billion valuation. The “total value locked” (TVL) on L2 platforms has exploded over the past year with around $5.75 billion currently held on these blockchains, according to tracker . Optimism is approaching a half-billion in TVL, though Offchain Labs’ Arbitrum is closing in on nearly $3 billion as the market leader. But unlike some of its competitors, Optimism is actually a Public Benefit Corporation with an open source codebase that has already led to a number of popular forks. “We made a commitment to the public that we would not take profit from operating centralized parts of the system, so we wanted to remove the financial incentive for ourselves to remain centralized,” Optimism CEO Jinglan Wang tells TechCrunch in an interview. “While we are making revenue, we’re giving all of that revenue back toward funding public goods on Ethereum … We don’t just want to say that we want to be decentralized, we also want to show the community that we’re setting up our own incentives to be compatible with that.” L2 solutions come in many flavors, the most talked about of which are called Zero-Knowledge (ZK) rollups and Optimistic rollups. Perhaps unsurprisingly, Optimism is based on Optimistic rollup technology, which has generally been seen as a more near-term viable solution due to some of the cryptographic complexities of ZK rollups that are used by other networks made by startups like StarkWare and Matter Labs. “We want to be future proof so we’re not closing the doors to the possibility of integrating a ZK [Ethereum Virtual Machine] down the line,” Wang says. “We’re also pragmatists and we don’t want our work to toil forever in academic hell — we want people to use it.” Optimism has been widely available on a public “mainnet” for over a year. Operating in public has its risks and rewards, the company recently paid out a $2 million bug bounty after security researcher discovered a vulnerability that would allow malicious actors to print money on the network. The bounty was one of the highest paid out by a blockchain startup. “We’re very into building out in the open, every line of code we write is open source as we write it, and similarly we’re transparent about the vulnerabilities and bugs that are found and disclosed in our network,” Wang says. “We want to build a good security culture around the Optimism community, where [ethical security hackers] know that if they find vulnerabilities, they will be compensated fairly.” Lately, the company has focused on reducing the complexity of its codebase and promoting close compatibility with code written for Ethereum so that developers don’t have to alter their existing applications to be compatible with Optimism. An upcoming release called “Bedrock” is doubling down on so-called “EVM-equivalence” and should reduce costs on the network substantially, the company said in a . |
Google discovers threat actor working as an ‘initial access broker’ for Conti ransomware hackers | Carly Page | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | Google’s Threat Analysis Group has observed a financially motivated threat actor working as an intermediary for the Russian hackers, including the . The group, which Google refers to as “Exotic Lily,” acts as an initial access broker, finding vulnerable organizations and selling access to their networks to the highest bidder. By contracting out the initial access to a victim’s network, ransomware gangs like Conti can focus on the execution phase of an attack. In the case of Exotic Lily, this initial access was gained through email campaigns, in which the group masqueraded as legitimate organizations and employees through the . In the majority of cases, a spoofed domain was nearly identical to the real domain name of an existing organization, but changed the top-level domains to “.us,” “.co” or “.biz.” In order to appear as legitimate employees, Exotic Lily set up social media profiles and AI-generated images of human faces. The attackers, which Google believes are operating from Central or Eastern Europe due to the threat actors’ working hours, would then send emails under the pretext of a business proposal, before ultimately uploading a payload to a public file-sharing service such as WeTransfer or Microsoft OneDrive. “This level of human interaction is rather unusual for cybercrime groups focused on mass-scale operations,” notes Google researchers Vlad Stolyarov and Benoit Sevens in a blog post shared with TechCrunch before publication. These malicious payloads initially took the form of documents containing an exploit for a zero-day in Microsoft’s MSHTML browser engine ( ), before the attackers switched to the delivery of ISO disk images containing hidden BazarLoader payloads. Google researchers say this shift confirms Exotic Lily’s relationship with a Russian cybercrime group tracked as Wizard Spider (also known as UNC1878), which is linked to the notorious Ryuk ransomware that has been used to target businesses, hospitals — — and government institutions since 2018. While the nature of this relationship remains unclear, Google says that Exotic Lily appears to operate as a separate entity, focusing on acquiring initial access through email campaigns, with follow-up activities that include deployment of Conti and Diavol ransomware. Exotic Lily, which was first observed in September 2021 and is still active today, was sending more than 5,000 phishing emails a day to as many as 650 organizations during the peak of its activity, Google said. While the group initially seemed to be targeting specific industries such as IT, cybersecurity and healthcare, it has more recently begun attacking a wide variety of organizations and industries, with less of a specific focus. Google has also shared indicators of compromise (IOCs) from Exotic Lily’s large-scale email campaign to help organizations defend their networks. |
Amie is a new calendar app with a social twist | Romain Dillet | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | Meet , a startup working on a brand new productivity app for both individuals and teams. The company is unveiling its app this week and users can sign up to the waitlist. Amie is a well-designed calendar app that helps you get things done and keep up with your team. Amie was founded by Dennis Müller, who previously worked as a product manager for challenger bank . Creandum, as well as Tiny.VC and several business angels, early on so that it could work on its product without too much pressure. And what I saw during a demo with Müller was a polished app that could easily attract a loyal user base. There are a lot of tiny details that make it much more convenient than the default option for many companies, which is Google Calendar. When you open Amie, it looks like a calendar, there’s no question about it. You can see the current week with all your events, click on an event to get details and move from one week to another. Amie But Amie is quite opinionated in its feature set, and especially around todo items. You can open your todo list in a column right next to your calendar and view them this way. But you can also drag them from the sidebar and drop them in the main calendar view to assign a date and time to your todo. “If you want to achieve something, the easiest way to do it is put it in your calendar, assign a time to it,” Müller told me. And it’s true that many people already use their calendar as a sort of todo list already. The fact that todos can live in the sidebar or in your week view gives more flexibility than adding your todos to your calendar directly. In the left-side column, you can also see a list of avatars. If you’re using Slack intensively, it looks a bit like the icons on the left to switch from one workspace to another. In Amie’s case, those icons represent other people in your team. Like in instant messengers, you can see if they’re currently available or busy based on their calendar. And if you hover over their avatar, you can toggle their calendar. For instance, it’s a good way to find out when it would be a good time to set up a meeting. Each person also gets their own profile. On this separate page, you can see what someone is doing right now, get a reminder about their birthday, add a few notes and view when was the last time you were together. You can also set recurring reminders. It’s a lightweight feature that could help you stay in touch with people more regularly. Amie You also get some information from third-party services. For instance, you can see the current song playing from this person’s Spotify account. You can also open their Twitter profile from there. “These calendar apps that are really focused on one person are cool. But if you look at other products that are successful today and if you want to generate some kind of network effects, we realized that we had to build some kind of profile,” Müller told me. The instant benefit of adding a social component to the calendar is that you can more easily stay on top of the company’s activities. Amie has a home view with an activity feed. On this screen, you can see when someone creates an event. It’s full of information and it could be particularly useful for companies with a transparent culture. “The home view could become the modern intranet,” Müller said. On this home view, you can also see a list of all your events and todos. You can check things off from this view. Finally, Amie has many of the power features that you would expect from a modern productivity tool. With just a keyboard shortcut, you can open a quick action menu, create an event, move to another view, etc. When you want to share your availabilities with someone else, you can choose some slots in your calendar and share a link with the other person — no Calendly required. When an event is coming up with a video call, you can join the call with a keyboard shortcut. Amie currently works with Google accounts on macOS and Windows. There’s also an iPhone app and the company is working on an Android app as well. On mobile, Amie has tried to locate all the important buttons and gestures near the bottom of the screen so that you don’t have to move your hand to reach a button in the corner. We’re currently experiencing a calendar renaissance. Many startups are trying to find the right formula to reinvent the calendar app for the Notion era. Amie competes with , , , and others. It’s arguably a big market. So it’s good to see so much innovation in the space. “For us, the calendar is the canvas,” Müller told me. “We do our job right if you sign up and you never open Google Calendar again.” Amie |
Face-swapping app Reface pulls out of Russia after users reject anti-war campaign | Natasha Lomas | 2,022 | 3 | 17 | While mainstream social networks like and have had their services blocked by state authorities in Russia in recent days, as the Kremlin seeks total control of the narrative around the war in Ukraine, , a Ukraine-based face-swapping app, has voluntarily pulled its app out of Russia. After Putin ordered his troops to invade Ukraine late last month, the startup took an early decision to try to the Kremlin’s media censorship — pushing anti-war messaging at users, along with calls to support sanctions against Russia and imagery of the devastation being wreaked on Ukraine. Reface also geo-targeted messages at Russian users specifically — urging them to take to the streets to protest against the war. The anti-war campaign resulted in millions of anti-war messages being served to Reface users in Russia. In a today the startup says some 13 million anti-war push notifications were sent (it says its app had around 2 million accounts in Russia). However the anti-war content caused an immediate — and, as it turned out, sustained — negative reaction from users in Russia who flooded the app with one-star reviews, as the below chart from its blog post indicates… Reface Reface’s blog says it’s interpreting the negative reaction of users in Russia as the “Russian audience couldn’t care less about the destroyed houses and women and children killed in Ukraine,” while noting there was some engagement that wasn’t entirely (or as) negative (but it says most was). “Realizing that our efforts were not enough to compete with total state propaganda in Russia, we decided to remove the Reface app from Russian App Store and Google Play,” it writes. “Those who downloaded the application before March 10 will be able to use it. But new downloads and subscriptions are disabled. “We don’t want to make any profit from the Russian market or associate with it in any way. Every person in Russia must feel the effects of sanctions and technological isolation due to the cruel war of their state against Ukraine,” Reface adds. The startup’s CEO and co-founder, Dima Shvets, confirmed that the decision to pull its apps out of Russia was Reface’s alone. “We have not been restricted [by Russia’s internet censor],” he told TechCrunch. “After the massive informational campaign we decided to quit, as don’t want to make anything in common with Russia.” Screengrab: Natasha Lomas/TechCrunch It’s another small sign of how the internet experience in Russia is becoming separated and segregated from the mainstream web — not just through the imposition of formal Western sanctions against Russian banks, named business execs and certain other entities in the country (such as the notorious Internet Research Agency troll farm), but via voluntary market exits from tech businesses, and . While the AI-driven face-swapping effect that Reface’s app was built for was originally intended for pure entertainment — letting users visualize themselves as celebrities in famous movie scenes, for example — the advent of war in the Ukrainian team’s homeland has evidently — and markedly — shifted the context in which they feel comfortable operating. “Earlier, Reface users entertained themselves by swapping themselves into Jack Sparrow and Iron Man. Now we encourage everyone to swap themselves into president Zelensky and animate photos with the Ukrainian anthem. Zelensky now has more Instagram followers than Kanye West. What a timeline!” is how Reface summarizes the changed consumer landscape in its blog post. It is continuing to use its app to encourage support for Ukraine outside Russia — letting users face-swap into a selection of viral video clips of Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, or pick from images of Ukrainian soldiers uploaded by users. It badges resulting pro-Ukraine synthetic media with the hashtag #StandWithUkraine — encouraging users to spread these visual messages of support to their social networks. In another recent twist to this parallel infowar that’s being fought online alongside actual war on the ground in Ukraine, deepfakes of Ukraine’s president have appeared online to try to undermine the country’s war effort: In recent days a manipulated video falsely showing Zelensky surrendering was found circulating on social networks including Telegram, Facebook and the Russian rival, VKontakte. It’s not clear where these fakes originated from — but, earlier this month, Ukraine’s Centre for Strategic Communications that Russia might deploy altered videos to try to manipulate public perception of its invasion. |
PG&E, Ford to explore electric pickup truck as backup generator for home | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) and Ford Motor Company are collaborating to explore how Ford’s new F-150 Lightning electric pickup truck can provide backup power for customers’ homes in the California utility’s service area. Earlier this week, that involves testing bidirectional charging capabilities to send electricity from the grid to the EV’s battery and back in the event of an outage. The utility company had to cut off power for hundreds and thousands of homes and businesses last year to prevent power lines from sparking wildfires during high-risk weather conditions, so it’s teaming up with automakers to find ways to avoid overstressing the grid. “Today, we are seeing breakthrough opportunities at the intersection of the energy and transportation industries,” PG&E CEO Patti Poppe said in a statement. “As more electric vehicles and new charging technology become available, it is critical that we better understand how EVs can interact with the electric grid and how we can best support our customers.” . The pickup’s 9.6 kW of Intelligent Backup Power, an onboard generator that’s making its debut in the Lightning, can provide up to 10 days of power to homes during an outage, depending on home usage, says PG&E. Ford had previously said it could provide full-home power for up to three days on a full charge. Ford’s Intelligent Backup Power, which automatically begins powering your home if your Lightning is plugged in at the time of an outage and then switches back to charging when the outage is over, will see its first installations in spring 2022. They’ll be supported by solar, battery and energy services provider Sunrun, which has partnered with Ford to install the 80-amp Ford Charge Station Pro and home integration system. Through an initial deployment with a small number of customers’ homes, PG&E aims to study Ford’s technology and learn how it connects to the electric grid and how it can support customer resiliency during grid outages. Beyond that, the two companies plan to explore additional use cases for bidirectional charging technology. |
Twitter removes Russian Embassy’s tweet accusing pregnant bombing victim of being a crisis actor | Taylor Hatmaker | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | A cluster of Russian Embassy Twitter accounts are sowing misinformation as the country’s bloody invasion of neighboring Ukraine escalates, but they might not get away with it for long. On Thursday, Twitter took action against one particularly egregious tweet claiming that a pregnant victim fleeing the site of was an actor in “some very realistic makeup.” The account belongs to the Russian Embassy in London, which has been actively disseminating false information about ongoing Russian aggression in Ukraine. Responding to a photo of a pregnant woman in the aftermath of the attack, @RussianEmbassy tweeted “… She has some very realistic make-up. She is also doing well with her beauty blogs. Plus she could not be in the maternity house at the time of the strike, as it has long been taken by the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who told all the staff to clear the place.” The false claims appear to have originated in , which accused of playing the part of two different pregnant women at the scene of the bombing. Russia continues to deny and distort its military aggression in Ukraine, often with lies that are easily debunked. But that information still bounces around the misinformation ecosystem, picking up steam and fueling the next even more outlandish claims. On Twitter, the Russian Embassy in London has had at least three tweets removed in the last 24 hours for violating the platform’s rules. Still, a pinned tweet at the top of the embassy’s feed accuses Ukraine of “exterminating” the people of two eastern regions of the country where the local leadership is backed by the Russian regime. The language of “extermination” echoes Russian President Vladimir Putin’s misleading justification for declaring war on Ukraine. “What is happening in the Donbas today is genocide,” Putin declared last month, laying false groundwork for the invasion. TechCrunch reached out to Twitter with questions about how the company draws the line on Russian disinformation around the invasion. It’s not Russia’s first time using its virtual embassy presence to sow its own narrative. The Atlantic Council’s Digital Forensic Research Lab has studied how the Russian government uses a “full-spectrum” blend of official and unofficial accounts to . “Some of the channels it uses are overt and official; others are covert and claim to be independent,” senior fellow Ben Nimmo wrote. “They all work together to create the appearance of multiple voices and points of view, masking a coordinated approach.” On Thursday, Twitter took more decisive action against at least one other prominent disinformation source, , an account playing an active role in spreading the false conspiracy theory that the U.S. holds biological weapons labs in Ukraine. The Biden administration that the influx of bioweapon-related misinformation may presage a Russian chemical weapon attack in the country. |
100ms secures $20M to power next generation of live video apps | Annie Njanja | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Live video conferencing infrastructure startup , based in India and the U.S., has raised $20 million in Series A funding to power the next generation of live video apps, coming barely five months after closing a seed round. This latest round was led by Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation, with participation from Matrix Partners India and LocalGlobe and existing investors Accel and Strive.vc. It brings to $24.5 million the total funding raised by the startup. The startup was established in 2020 when the founders were working at Disney+ Hotstar, one of the largest streaming platforms in India, on a feature that would enable people in India to watch live matches. “We decided to build a feature, which enabled users to watch matches on the app, and have video calls with their friends to enjoy the match. We researched the solutions available out there and chose one of the existing video SDK providers to do that; it took us four months to get the product working,” 100ms co-founder and CEO told TechCrunch. “And that is when it all started, we were like no, in this new world, where most experiences are going to be through live videos, it should not take four months to build such platforms,” added Gupta, who co-founded the startup with and . The challenge they experienced to build the app inspired them to create live video infrastructure to allow companies in edtech, fitness and entertainment to add Zoom-like video conferencing inside their apps and livestream the apps to platforms like YouTube and Facebook. It took them about nine months to build the new product, making it possible for companies to integrate, test and go live within a week. “Most companies shy away from building this technology because it is very complex. … We are targeting any business trying to embed video inside their application. It could be an edtech company doing online classes, a health tech company who’s doing telehealth calls between a doctor and a patient or somebody selling something via live commerce,” said Gupta, who worked as a live video infrastructure product manager at Meta before joining Disney+ Hotstar. 100ms is targeting businesses, like edtechs, telehealth firms and fitness studios, looking to embed video inside their applications. 100ms The startup has experienced 20x growth over the last quarter as demand for their product continues to rise even as live experiences continue to be the norm. Since August last year, over 2,200 businesses have used 100ms live video infrastructure, including FrontRow and WhiteHat Jr, both edtech platforms; Circle, a platform for creators and brands; Paytm Insider, a live events platform; and Kutumb, a community app. “I think the reason why a lot of this acceleration has happened is because we reduce integration time. We also want to build template models that companies can use to customize the live events for a more real-world experience. … For us, we feel that this will be the beginning of our metaverse journey,” said Behera, who started off as a banker before pivoting to a career in tech. They plan to use the funding to expand the team, including hiring more video engineers, as they work to add more capabilities to the product. Falcon Edge’s Alpha Wave Incubation’s managing director, Anirudh Singh, while commenting about investing in 100ms said, “Online gyms are asking trainees to report their injuries. Online schools are adding libraries, and enabling 1-1 help sessions. Online dating apps are looking to recreate better virtual meeting experiences. 100ms is enabling product makers to imagine and add sophisticated live-engagement, by abstracting the complexities of video streaming.” |
Daily Crunch: 2 months after launching, São Paulo-based payments startup Yuno raises $10M | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for Thursday, March 10, 2022! Am writing to you after coming off a live taping of Equity, which means I am still full of adrenaline. Doing stuff live is really good fun, which is why I am pleased to bring you a raft of news about our upcoming live events! ; OpenView Ventures’ ; and we just announced that . TechCrunch is going to have a busy darn year. We can’t wait to see you! – Much is going on as always, but let’s flip the script and start with some venture news before we delve into startups, yeah? TechCrunch . The company is a blend of venture fund and accelerator, we report. Moving on, let’s knock out the day’s huge rounds: Up first is Lunar, a Nordic neobank. It . As part of the news, Lunar also released crypto trading and a B2B payments service. And people said that neobank fundraising was dead! Also out today was news from Stilt, . Furthermore, . The company reached $70 million ARR last year. Now, the rest of the news: And to close us out, . Our . / Getty Images For many first-time founders, calculating the size of the market in which they hope to compete is one of their biggest challenges. Calculating TAM, SAM and SOM sounds like an existential exercise, but there’s no need to dread it “if you approach market sizing methodically,” says Marjorie Radlo-Zandi, a veteran investor and entrepreneur. In a comprehensive article for TechCrunch+, she breaks down the steps required to capture these key metrics that “show prospective investors how they stand to gain from investing in your company, and put yourself in the best possible position to achieve your goals.” |
Stripe gets friendly with crypto, again | Lucas Matney | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Payments giant Stripe already powers a pretty major swath of the web’s financial infrastructure, now it’s launching crypto payments support to give customers an easier path to onboard web3 users and interact with cryptocurrencies. The company announced a suite of products today aiming to give customers access to tools and APIs that make it easier for customers to buy and store crypto tokens, cash out, trade NFTs and handle compliance workflows like Know Your Customer (KYC). Stripe’s support page notes that the company’s products will enable support for users to buy more than 135+ cryptocurrencies with fiat currencies in 180 countries. Stripe co-founder John Collison took to Thursday to announce the new features. Stripe has had a complicated relationship with crypto over the years, , calling the cryptocurrency “less useful” as a payments means after initially supporting the cryptocurrency in 2014. In October, the company began posting job listings for building out a crypto team and added crypto VC to its board weeks later. The company’s re-entry to the space is a major threat to existing crypto payments processors that lack the company’s expansive reach. Alongside the news, crypto exchange FTX announced that it is partnering with Stripe to improve its identity compliance features and fiat onboarding workflows for users. |
6 technologists discuss how no-code tools are changing software development | Karan Bhasin | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | has been expanding rapidly in the past few years. As we learned from our , the technology democratizes access to modern software development, but there are still some kinks to iron out. Mass adoption is still held up, however: many organizations prefer to build from scratch, and complete end-to-end solutions are still nowhere to be found. To get a more in-depth look at the technical aspects of the space, we decided to talk to some of the technologists ushering in the no-code/low-code revolution. To start off, it appears that no-code/low-code tools hasn’t had much impact on the number of people working in IT. Deb Gildersleeve, CIO of Quickbase, said the propagation of no-code/low-code will help IT focus on more demanding tasks. “We believe that IT needs to spend more time thinking about how technology impacts people. Tools that eliminate menial and time-consuming tasks help save time and energy to focus on bigger picture issues that make people’s lives easier,” she said. No-code/low-code incurs technical debt to a degree, an aspect that has become a major talking point. David Hsu, founder and CEO of Retool, feels that it’s less a case of eliminating technical debt at present and more about choosing where the debt would be an acceptable consequence. “What can be done is deciding which technical debt is worth the flexibility low-code confers, and which technical debt does not reach that threshold. For example, giving non-technical builders the ability to design and define their own interfaces feels very worth it from where we’re standing,” he said. “On the other hand, we find that letting non-technical developers manage integrations, data flow, business logic, and CRON jobs — without some level of technical oversight or guardrails — is not worth the technical debt.” For this survey, we spoke to executives about their favorite no-code/low-code tools, the different impacts these development suites have had on the IT job market, and how to ensure minimal technical debt, among other things. We spoke to: As CTO of a low-code platform that pioneered this category 20 years ago, everything I do relates to low-code and how the tool can help business leaders and developers build the serious applications they require. In fact, we build as much of our own stack as possible using our low-code platform – for our UI tools we have a few base, high-code components, and a large part of the remaining OutSystems UI platform is built in low-code. Looking ahead, there will always be a need for developers with expertise in high-code. Instead of thinking about these tools eradicating the need to learn how to code, they should be thought of as a way to remove the burden of long-term, undifferentiated maintenance work present in application development. Low-code application development platforms will handle this undifferentiated work and developers will not have to worry about that. There are an abundance of no-code/low-code tools available that fit a range of developer needs. Many tools in this category solve for a narrow set of problems and often run into roadblocks when they need to scale or evolve over time. In my experience, what businesses need is a platform that combines agility, performance and scale that results in high-quality and secure applications. One that encompasses both high expressiveness and high productivity of developers and provides full elite CI/CD capabilities. Companies should seek out enterprise-grade low-code tools that allow them to build critical apps that solve serious business challenges while optimizing security, compliance, and scale, and removing issues like legacy code and integrations. No-code/low-code tools do not impact the number of people working in IT. Instead, they optimize the role of IT, helping to modernize legacy systems, eradicate technical debt, and enable them to build applications at a rapid pace. It helps IT professionals empower their own teams to build the applications they need rather than rely on off-the-shelf options, and allows teams and developers to focus on more meaningful, creative work rather than maintaining outdated back-end systems or doing menial tasks. One differentiator for no-code/low-code tools is whether they can embody the CI/CD process with appropriate governance and compliance, ensuring that companies separate privileged access to different production and non-production environments. As more businesses adopt low-code platforms, we’re going to see IT departments grow in importance as they add greater value through custom applications with much greater speed and agility. This area is rapidly growing and aids in closing the massive gap in development talent we’re facing. One of the biggest trends we’re seeing is the need to build serious apps that can quickly scale to hundreds of thousands and even millions of users. The problem for many developers is, doing that requires developing apps to run in the cloud at internet-scale, using best practices of modern cloud architectures and technologies, which can be incredibly complex and expensive. |
Pokémon GO creator Niantic is acquiring WebAR development platform 8th Wall | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Niantic, the augmented reality platform behind Pokémon GO, is acquiring WebAR development platform 8th Wall, the company on Thursday. The financial terms of the deal were not disclosed. Niantic says the deal marks its largest acquisition to date. The company says the acquisition will help enhance its developer platform while also helping developers create their visions for AR. Founded in 2016, 8th Wall currently supports billions of devices globally, including 5 billion smartphones across iOS and Android as well as computers and AR/VR headsets, Niantic says. Its platform has been used to create AR activations by numerous companies, including Netflix, Microsoft, Universal Pictures and more. “From the beginning, Niantic set out to build AR technology that enables people to connect to others, discover new places, and play with friends in the real world,” Niantic said in a about the announcement. “To make this happen, we’re fusing the physical and the digital by creating the world’s most precise 3D map of the planet. With our Lightship platform, launched globally in November last year, we’re offering all developers the world’s largest immersive canvas to bring their creations to life on a massive scale. 8th Wall greatly complements our vision for Lightship, and we plan to expand our developer platform tools with their proven WebAR technology.” In a about the acquisition, 8th Wall founder and CEO Erik Murphy-Chutorian said that by joining Niantic, 8th Wall will be able to create more tools to build engaging AR experiences that will encourage people to discover new places. “We started 8th Wall to build powerful computer vision technology that would enable developers to create AR applications that could run everywhere seamlessly,” Murphy-Chutorian said. “We did this with a complete set of tools to create WebAR. There is so much potential for web-based augmented reality and we will continue to unlock this through the lens of Niantic’s real-world AR universe. We are looking forward to working with Niantic to create the best planet-scale platform technologies to foster even more magical shared experiences.” The acquisition comes a few months after from Coatue, valuing the company at $9 billion. The company plans to use the investment to build what it calls the “real-world metaverse.” Pokémon GO, which is arguably the company’s most popular endeavor, continues to prove to be successful, as it earned over in 2020, according to app analytics firm Sensor Tower. Not all of Niantic’s games have turned out to be successful — the company recently announced it will Harry Potter: Wizards Unite after in-app consumer spending and global installs dropped 57% year over year. |
Rivian shares reach new low after reporting disappointing Q4 earnings | Alex Wilhelm | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | electric automaker that went public late last year, its fourth-quarter financial results and calendar 2021 outcome, results that along with its production forecast for 2022 disappointed Wall Street and sent shares to a new low. Rivian said Thursday that it generated $54 million in Q4 2021 revenue, nearly precisely its full-year tally of $55 million. Rivian delivered 909 vehicles in the final three months of the year. The company did move into more large-scale deliveries in Q4 2021, but it simply was not enough to bring it even close to breaking-even, as anticipated. On an adjusted basis, Rivian lost $2.43 per share. Yahoo Finance that the company was expected to lose $2.05 per share on an adjusted basis against $63.99 million in total revenue for the period. More simply, Rivian posted smaller revenues than the street expected, and lost more money. In regular trading, shares of Rivian fell a sharp 6.35% to $41.16 during a generally negative session, reaching a new 52-week low; the Nasdaq Composite was itself off nearly a full percent. In after-hours trading, following its earnings release, Rivian shares shed more than 13%. Naturally we’re always skeptical of adjusted numbers, so let’s dial in some GAAP results while we’re here. In Q4 2021, Rivian’s revenue of $54 million led to negative gross profit of $383 million, and a net loss inclusive of all costs of $2.46 billion, or $4.84 per share. For the full 2021 period, the company’s $55 million in revenues led to negative gross profit of $465 million and a net loss of $4.69 billion, or -$22.98 per share. We are not merely including gross profit results to be cheeky. It’s an issue for the company, which said in its earnings report that it expects to “recognize negative gross margins throughout 2022.” So don’t expect to see the company climb closer to break-even status in operating terms this year; it will instead claw its way toward gross profit-neutrality this year. But that’s just numbers. And numbers in the red are standard for EV companies busy ramping production. So let’s talk deliveries, pricing, the snarled supply chain and what’s coming for the company in the coming quarters. Yahoo Finance reported in advance that analysts had expected the company to target 40,000 vehicle deliveries in 2022. However, in its earnings report Rivian instead said that it will “have sufficient parts and materials to produce 25,000 vehicles across our R1 and RCV platforms” in the year, a sharply smaller number. That delivery number will square out to what Rivian anticipates is a $4.75 billion adjusted EBITDA loss for the year, with the company not guiding to a more rigorous profit metric. Rivian’s 2022 is shaping up to be a challenging one fraught with supply chain crunches and competition from the likes GM and Ford, which are launching their own EV pickup trucks and SUVs. CEO RJ Scaringe said the company will announce next week a new chief operating officer to help scale production and manage the supply chain. “The biggest constraints we now face really lie with the supply chain,” Scaringe told investors on the call. “It’s really a small number of parts, for which the supplier isn’t ramping at the same rate as our production lines are ramping up.” |
Buckle up, autonomous vehicles finally get federal safety standards | Rebecca Bellan | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Autonomous vehicles and vehicles with automated driving functions now have their own set of motor vehicle safety standards, a U.S. federal agency ruled on Thursday. The ruling begins to provide clarity on how passenger safety should be defined in vehicles that are designed without things like driver’s seats and steering wheels. The U.S. Department of Transportation’s National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration (NHTSA) issued the that updates the safety requirements for occupants in vehicles that don’t have traditional manual controls associated with a human driver. The rule, which, among other modifications, changes terminology in the Federal Motor Vehicle Safety Standards (FMVSS) to reflect the spatial layout of automated vehicles, builds on the agency’s . Last year, NHTSA issued an order that required AV operators and manufacturers to report crashes to the agency, and in 2020, it launched an AV testing initiative that allows states and companies to submit information about AV testing that can be viewed by the public. “As the driver changes from a person to a machine in ADS-equipped vehicles, the need to keep the humans safe remains the same and must be integrated from the beginning,” said Dr. Steven Cliff, NHTSA’s deputy administrator, in a statement. “With this rule, we ensure that manufacturers put safety first.” In a lot of ways, the rule is reactive to an industry that’s already well under way. However, no purpose-built AVs have been deployed on public roads yet, so forming the basis of regulation for new types of vehicles now is certainly a step in the right direction. The rule firstly makes changes to terminology that are written for traditionally designed vehicles in order to avoid both ambiguity and unnecessary terminology. Terms like “driver’s seat,” “steering wheel” or “passenger seat” won’t make sense to use as spatial references for purpose-built AVs that aren’t built with such features. and are both building such AVs that are designed for sharing and do not have much in the way of traditional interiors. However, companies like , and are still deploying automated vehicles on the street that can be operated by both an automated driving system and by a steering control, so those must have their own distinction, says NHTSA. Some automated vehicles, like , are being used to deliver goods, but not humans, so NHTSA’s standards have been tailored to exclude those vehicles, ruling that the original safety need doesn’t exist when there are no occupants to protect. NHTSA’s final rule also discusses changes to requirements by manufacturers resulting from revisions to the terminology, “such as the treatment of advanced air bags and advanced air bag suppression telltales in [automated driving system]-equipped vehicles, lockability requirements, and changes to…seat belt requirements for medium-sized buses and large school buses following the removal of the term ‘driver.’” Autonomous vehicle makers are already designing their new vehicles with passenger safety in mind. Zoox, for example, says it has , and has designed a system that leverages sensors, switches and cameras to ensure proper seat belt usage among passengers. But the NHTSA ruling provides guidelines going forward and a method of holding manufacturers accountable in an evolving industry. “Through the 2020s, an important part of USDOT’s safety mission will be to ensure safety standards keep pace with the development of automated driving and driver assistance systems,” said U.S. Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg in a statement. “This new rule is an important step, establishing robust safety standards for ADS-equipped vehicles.” |
Google adds Air Raid Alerts to Android phones in Ukraine | Aisha Malik | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Google is starting to introduce a rapid Air Raid Alerts system for Android phones in Ukraine, the company on Thursday. The new feature is the tech giant’s latest update on its response to Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. “Tragically, millions of people in Ukraine now rely on air strike alerts to try to get to safety. At the request, and with the help, of the government of Ukraine, we’ve started rolling out a rapid Air Raid Alerts system for Android phones in Ukraine,” said Kent Walker, the president of global affairs at Google, in a about the announcement. Walker said the rollout is supplemental to Ukraine’s existing air raid alert systems and is based on alerts already being delivered by the Ukrainian government. In a , Google’s vice president of engineering, Dave Burke, explained that the system leverages the company’s low latency alert mechanism that it built for earthquake alerts. Burke also noted that the system is beginning to roll out starting today and that it will target all Android phones in Ukraine over the next few days. The system leverages our low latency alert mechanism we built for earthquake alerts. The air raid system is supplemental to, and shares the same triggers used for, the country's existing air raid alert systems. 2/3 — Dave Burke (@davey_burke) Google says the feature will work on phones with Google Play Services that are running Android 5 or later, and no action is required from most users to receive the feature. It will roll out over the coming days and should reach most devices in the country over the next few days. For the feature to work, the device location setting must be “on” and the phone will need internet connectivity to update. Users can choose to turn the feature on or off either the Safety & Emergency or Location Services settings on Android 12 devices, and in the Location Services setting on older Android versions, as follows: In the same blog post, Google also announced that it will continue its work to limit recommendations for a number of Russian state-funded media outlets across its platforms. The company is also pausing most of its commercial activities in Russia. “Following our announcement last week that we Google ads in Russia, we’ve now paused the vast majority of our commercial activities in Russia — including ads on our properties and networks globally for all Russian-based advertisers, new Cloud sign ups, the payments functionality for most of our services, and monetization features for YouTube viewers in Russia.” Google says that its free services, including Search, Gmail and YouTube, are still operating in Russia. The company says it will continue to monitor developments. |
‘Hey Google, pay for my parking’ feature is live | Jaclyn Trop | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | For Android users, this could be the end of parking tickets as we know them. At least, that’s the promise Google makes with its latest update. Google announced Thursday a that rolled out through its , including the ability for users to pay for parking using their voice through a partnership with ParkMobile. The goal is to help drivers eliminate the pain points of paying at the meter when it’s too cold, a meeting runs longer than expected or the cup holder doesn’t have enough quarters. This partnership is the latest example of Google’s push into transportation, including adding biking and ride-hailing in Google Maps, and working with automakers to integrate its . Parking is the low-hanging fruit that helps Google integrate even further into consumers’ daily lives. This partnership with Parkmobile has limited reach for now. But if the past hints at what’s to come, Google will be in no time. The voice parking feature is as straightforward as it sounds. Once you park in a spot, say “Hey Google, pay for parking,” and follow Google Assistant’s prompts to pay from your phone. Google Pay handles the transaction. “No more coins, no more confusion,” Google promises. Part of the confusion stems from the patchwork of parking apps available to download. The pay-for-parking function cuts through the clutter by defaulting to ParkMobile, the leading app coordinating parking zones across more than 400 U.S. cities. The Android upgrade will also help you check how much time is left on the meter and add time with voice command. Just say, “Hey Google, parking status” or “Hey Google, extend parking.” It also matters because it’s another way Google is tapping into your car to track your personal information, including your vehicle’s whereabouts. And it’s a win for Google in its war against Apple for your data. For Apple, Google and Amazon, too, the ability to listen in on your car gives them more opportunities to sell you subscription services or sell your information to third parties eager to tailor their ads to your driving habits, location and more. More data leads to massive opportunities for the tech giants to reap more revenue. Last year, Google and ParkMobile enabled an option to pay for street parking via Google Maps, but the ability to pay by voice is a leap forward for Android users, Google and ParkMobile — as well as potential third-party customers hungry for targeted data. |
Twitter’s latest update makes it easier to escape its recommendation algorithm (Update: Twitter removed it!) | Sarah Perez | 2,022 | 3 | 10 | Twitter has updated its app to make it easier to switch between the algorithmically programmed Home timeline and the feed that displays the “Latest” tweets, using swipes. Typically, when users want to move between timelines, they have to tap in the top-right of the screen, then do so again to switch back. But starting today on iOS, tapping that icon will offer the option to pin both the Home and Latest timelines to your Twitter Home page, so you can instead swipe back and forth between the two feeds. The Home and Latest timelines are now just a swipe away for everyone on iOS, and soon on Android and web. Tap the ✨ icon to pin (or unpin) the Latest timeline to your Home tab for easy access. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) Explains Twitter, the update makes the option to see recent posts “more visible and intuitive to use.” It also reduces confusion by making it easier to see which timeline you’re currently scrolling, the company says. The change comes at a time when there’s been increased regulatory pressure on tech companies related to their algorithmic recommendation systems and the lack of transparency around their inner workings. For example, a bipartisan group of U.S. lawmakers , which would require tech companies to offer a version of their platforms that doesn’t leverage user data to make recommendations. The bill wants to give users the option to turn off the tech company’s recommendation algorithms if they choose. Since then, Instagram a chronological feed option. (Or technically, a reverse-chronological feed, if we’re being precise.) Twitter, however, had already offered such an option, though some may not have known it existed. This latest change may exactly help to better surface the feature — the sparkle icon sits in the same place as before — but it could make it easier to quickly swap between timelines. In addition to supporting user choice, a “Latest” feed is also the sort of tool that people turn to in a breaking news situation, when the immediacy of information is more critical than an algorithmic suggestion of the “best” content you may have missed. And that’s particularly useful now amid the Russia-Ukraine war, where people are relying on social media apps to get the latest news about what’s happening on the ground. At launch, the feature is iOS only, but it will “soon” roll out to both Android and the web. Pushed for more specificity on that date, Twitter could only promise it would be “in the coming weeks.” Twitter had first started publicly this feature in October. The company said feedback was positive so it has decided to ship it more broadly. Unfortunately for those who prefer a chronological feed, you are to set it as a default, which is an annoyance for many who more regularly reference the Latest timeline. : due to the complaints, Twitter has — a decision that now means users have to go back to tapping the sparkle icon each time they want to change views, which is still not ideal. While many of Twitter’s (vocal) power users prefer a Latest tweets-focused experience, a quieter group of casual Twitter users likely don’t mind seeing the highlights as they much more infrequently log in. But Twitter is always stuck having to satisfy both audiences, which is why it should have probably just allowed users to choose their own setting in the first place. We heard you –– some of you always want to see latest Tweets first. We've switched the timeline back and removed the tabbed experience for now while we explore other options. — Twitter Support (@TwitterSupport) |
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