Thursday, November 18, 2021

TechCrunch

TechCrunch

Chiper aims to ease inventory burdens for Latin American corner stores

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 05:30 AM PST

Mom-and-pop corner store owners in Latin America manage relationships with over 100 different suppliers, on average, often traveling long distances to pick up inventory, so they aren't able to regularly restock.

Most of these relationships are largely managed manually and on paper, but Chiper developed an e-commerce ecosystem for corner stores that is shifting that relationship into the digital realm.

The Colombia-based company is taking on some of that inventory burden by providing access to inventory at lower prices and often same-day delivery on thousands of products.

Chiper, founded in 2018 by CEO Jose Bonilla, is already the primary supplier and operating system for over 40,000 corner stores to connect them to retail chains like Walmart and 7-Eleven.

"The way that retailers design their systems to visit corner stores means the stores have to buy more products to last a longer time between visits, but often don't have the working capital or shelf space," Bonilla told TechCrunch. "We built an end-to-end platform to buy from the CPGs ourselves and deliver it to the corner stores in less than 24 hours. All of the processes are connected with our technology that stakeholders access from an app."

Bonilla says the company is just getting started, though, as there are more than 3.7 million corner stores across Latin America. Together, they brought in $330 billion in annual revenue in recent years, and Bonilla estimates that will soon reach $500 billion.

To get to a milestone of 100,000 stores, the company recently took in $53 million in Series B funding, led by Nosara Capital, with participation from Tiger Global, Endeavor Catalyst, InQlab, Alter Global and Interplay. To date, the company has raised more than $65 million, which included a $12 million Series A in October 2020.

Both Nosara and Tiger are new investors for the company, which saw seven times revenue growth in the last 12 months. Those results are what triggered the company going into the market and looking for capital to keep the pace, Bonilla said.

Orchata raises $4M, aims to build a 'Gopuff for Latin America'

It was that year over year growth that attracted Nosara as well, the firm said.

“The Chiper platform dramatically improves the procurement process for corner stores by providing a greater assortment of goods from a broad network of suppliers, faster and more reliable fulfillment through an asset-light logistics network, and lower prices from aggregated demand and a more streamlined supply chain," Ian Loizeaux, partner at Nosara Capital, said in a written statement. "The business is growing seven times year-over-year and has the highest gross margins we've seen in this space globally, which speaks to the strength of their value proposition and the company’s first mover advantage."

Indeed, Chiper has scaled across both Mexico and Colombia over the past year, amassing 3,000 product SKUs and reaching 10,000 orders per day in the third quarter of this year. It is now poised to launch in Brazil early next year and add another 2,000 products by 2023.

The new capital will aid in that expansion into Brazil; adding 200 employees in areas like engineers, data scientists and machine learning experts; and launching embedded financial services. Bonilla plans to be at 650 employees by the end of the year.

"The challenge is building a habit and moving from decades of buying on paper to using a phone for core business processes," he added. "We still have a lot of stores to go, and we have to be aggressive in bringing on new customers."

Last-mile delivery in Latin America is ready to take off

Kandji pulls in $100M Series C on $800M valuation, up 10x since last year

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 05:13 AM PST

Kandji, the startup building an Apple device management business, has been doing pretty well for itself with rapdily growing revenue, a fat valuation and lots of investment capital rolling in. Today, the company announced a $100 million Series C on an $800 million valuation, up 10x in the last year when the company did its $21 million Series A. It quickly followed with a $60 million Series C last April.

Tiger Global led today’s investment with participation from Definition, Frontline Ventures and existing investors First Round Capital, Greycroft, Felicis Ventures, The Spruce House Partnership, B Capital Group, SVB Capital and Okta Ventures. Kandji has raised over $188 million, according to the company, with $181 million coming since last October.

The company offers medium-to-large businesses a way to manage their Apple devices and he says that the pandemic and working from home really drove inbound customer interest. In fact, revenue has grown over 700 percent in the last year, according to founder and CEO Adam Pettit.

Part of that is the result of growth in Europe, which has led to the startup opening a London office and that part of their market contributing substantially to the revenue mix. “We just launched operations in Europe. We [opened an office in] London, and we’re going to be rapidly hiring there,” he said. “And the catalyst for that was really interesting. We do very little to no marketing internationally, but we’ve seen that over the last year, roughly 25% of our top line revenues comes internationally.”

He is also seeing bigger customers more generally, who are becoming more comfortable that Kandji is in it for the long haul with this level of investment. “We’ve been adding larger and larger customers as we’ve been around longer, and our customers are getting comfortable that we’re here to stay,” he said. “In order to manage those [larger] customers pre- and post- sales, you need more sophisticated teams. We’ve been building that out over the last six months.”

Pettit says that they have over 1000 companies using the platform, and grew from 40 employees at the start of the year to over 250 today, and he hopes to get to 400 by next year. Last year when I spoke to him around the Series C, Pettit talked about how important it was to build a diverse and inclusive culture, and that it started with recruiting. He says that commitment has not wavered.

“We actually do a number of different things to expand the reach of our pipeline, making sure we’re moving outside of our normal networks to grab candidates that would not otherwise be available to us. The other thing that’s been great for [building diversity] for us, and I’d imagine for a lot of other companies, is being able to hire remotely means that we’re not targeting one specific market. And so that [really helps] for increasing the diversity of our hiring pipelines,” he said.

While the company has offices in San Diego and London, Pettit says his is a remote first company and he intends to keep it that way moving forward.

Apple introduces device management solution aimed at small business

Cross-selling startup Carro secures $20M to connect brands with each other, influencers

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 05:00 AM PST

Brands are always looking for new ways to get in front of potential customers, but though influencer marketing has grown, it's still not so easy for brands to find the right person.

That's where Carro comes in. David Perry and Jason Goldberg co-founded the company in 2015 and built a cross-store selling and influencer commerce platform that is used by more than 7 million influencers and 30,000 brands, like Blendjet, Arizona Iced Tea and Chubbies Shorts.

Carro can be installed from the Shopify App store and enables brand partnerships to sell each other's products without having to purchase inventory or manage logistics and returns. It also has a feature for brands to discover influencers who already love their products so they can build and maintain a relationship.

"When a customer purchases a bike, for example, they will most likely need a helmet, gloves and other accessories at the same time," CEO Perry told TechCrunch. "We get them to see what things can go together with what you sell. For example, you sell makeup, but not brushes, so you could add them to your store without having to purchase them for your inventory."

Goldberg noted that Carro got started when influencer marketing was a relatively new term and people had large followings, but not an easy way to get connected to brands. That has now changed: the global influencer marketing market has more than doubled since 2019 and is poised to be valued at $13.8 billion in 2021.

That growth impacted Carro, too. It grew by over 500% in the last year, Perry said. To meet that demand, the company closed on $20 million of Series B funding. It was led by Alpha Edison, which was joined by PayPal Ventures, GC1 Ventures, Corazon Capital and a group of individuals who use Carro.

Nate Redmond, managing partner at Alpha Edison, said in a written statement that the company "presents a compelling new way for brands to grow, by building direct relationships with customers without spending all of their profits on online advertising. We've been impressed with the pace at which the Carro team innovates and utilizes deep customer insights to deliver optimal results for customers."

The new funding gives Carro $30 million in total funding to date. It will be used to grow Carro's team of 50 employees, product development and network expansion.

Meanwhile, the company has more than 1 million products in its network and sees 320 million visitors a month. In the past 12 months, over $10 billion was sold by brands through Carro.

"One thing that makes us happy is that when a smaller merchant, who was packing orders in their garage, joins Carro. They get really busy and can supercharge their business without having to save up tons of money for Facebook ads," Goldberg said.

Can social and e-commerce transform the future of the open web?

Cortex raises $15M Series A to help development teams wrangle their microservices

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 05:00 AM PST

Cortex, a startup that helps engineering teams get improved visibility into the Rube Goldberg machine that is their microservices architecture and improve their overall development practices around it, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Tiger Global and Sequoia Capital, which led the company’s $2.5 million seed round. A number of angel investors, including Gokul Rajaram, Snyk CEO Peter McKay and Front co-founder and CEO Mathilde Collin, also participated in this round.

Current customers include the likes of Grammarly, 8×8 and Rappi. Cortex says it experienced 10x customer growth since its launch in May 2021 (though we’re probably talking about a relatively low baseline here).

The company’s mission is to build a system of record for engineering teams — or at least those that adopt modern development practices. It’s this services catalog that’s at the heart of what Cortex does and it was also the first product the team launched. Now it is starting to build out its features around this catalog.

“We very quickly realized that once you have all these microservices being tracked in this catalog, you can do some interesting things there,” Cortex co-founder and CTO Ganesh Datta said.

Image Credits: Cortex

“Engineering leaders have very limited visibility into which teams are performing well or need additional resources across critical initiatives and reliability, security and just overall adoption of best practices,” said Cortex co-founder and CEO Anish Dhar. “On the other hand, you see teams like SRE, security and platform, who are still stuck using Excel spreadsheets, tracking hundreds, sometimes thousands of services across several teams. How do you actually align these teams and drive consistency?”

The goal here is to give engineering leaders insights into the quality of their services, but also to help the engineers themselves understand what services are available and what their status is.

That means a team can use Cortex to define its production readiness, for example, by setting up a checklist of criteria a service needs to meet before it’s ready to be pushed live (this could include a dashboard, alerting, on-call rotations, etc.). All of this is done using the company’s Cortex Query Language (CQL).

Cortex pulls in data from about 30 commonly used tools like GitHub, Bitbucket, Datadog, GitLab, Jira, SignalFX and your Kubernetes clusters.

“What’s really impressive about Cortex is it works from both top-down as well as bottom-up,” Sequoia partner and Cortex board member Bogomil Balkansky explained. “It has a very strong value proposition for both engineering leaders and engineering executives in the sense of giving them a great framework for how to set expectations and standards across organizations — and how to say, ‘hey, every service in our organization needs to do X, Y and Z, needs to be upgraded to the latest version Node.js, needs to have these and these things — and then being able to track what percentage complies with all we call expectations. But it also helps individual engineers and individual teams keep track of their own work.”

With today’s announcement, the company is also launching its Service Creation tool, which gives developers a basic scaffold for new services based on their own templates. In a way, that’s a logical next step for the company. There’s no better way to help teams improve the consistency of their microservices practices than by automating them, after all.

Also new with today’s release are new teams features to help improve cross-team collaboration and developer onboarding.

“As Salesforce did for sales, Marketo did for marketing and ServiceNow did for IT, Cortex now does for engineering,” said John Curtius, partner at Tiger Global. “Cortex helps teams set best practices and guidelines for development, making it easy for engineering, SRE, security and DevOps to work together to create higher quality services. Cortex orchestrates a culture change where engineering organizations become proactive in their approach to software quality and are resilient to the inevitable and constant changes that come with building software.”

Cortex snags $2.25M seed to build services catalog for development teams

UK names five projects to get funding for CSAM detection

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 04:39 AM PST

The UK government has named five projects that have scored public funding under a ‘tech safety’ challenged announced in September — when the Home Office said it wanted to encourage the tech industry and academia to develop novel AI/scanning technologies that could be implemented on end-to-end encrypted (e2ee) services to detect child sexual abuse material (CSAM).

A number of mainstream messaging services already use e2ee such as Facebook-owned WhatsApp and Apple’s iMessage.

The Home Office has claimed it’s looking for a middle ground that doesn’t require digital service providers to abandon the use of end-to-end encryption but will still allow for CSAM material to be detected and passed to law enforcement, also without the security being backdoored. At least that’s the claim.

The Safety Tech Challenge Fund is being administered by the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) — and following the announcement of the funding awards yesterday, digital minister, Chris Philp, said in a statement: “It's entirely possible for social media platforms to use end-to-end encryption without hampering efforts to stamp out child abuse. But they've failed to take action to address this problem so we are stepping in to help develop the solutions needed. It is not acceptable to deploy E2EE without ensuring that enforcement and child protection measures are still in place.”

The five projects which have been awarded an initial £85,000 apiece by the UK government — with a further £130k potentially available to be divided up between the “strongest” projects (bringing the total funding pot up to £555k) — are as follows:

  • Edinburgh-based digital forensics firm Cyan Forensics and real-time risk intelligence focused Crisp Thinking, in partnership with the University of Edinburgh and the not-for-profit Internet Watch Foundation, which will develop a plug-in to be integrated within encrypted social platforms to “detect CSAM by matching content against known illegal material”
  • Parental control app maker SafeToNet and Anglia Ruskin University which will develop a suite of live video-moderation AI technologies that can run on any smart device — and are intended to “prevent the filming of nudity, violence, pornography and CSAM in real-time, as it is being produced”
  • Enterprise security firm GalaxKey, based in St Albans, which will work with Poole-based content moderation software maker Image Analyser and digital identity and age assurance firm Yoti to “develop software focusing on user privacy, detection and prevention of CSAM and predatory behavior, and age verification to detect child sexual abuse before it reaches an E2EE environment, preventing it from being uploaded and shared”
  • Content moderation startup DragonflAI, based in Edinburgh, which will also work with Yoti to combine its on-device nudity AI detection tech with the latter’s age assurance technologies — in order to “spot new indecent images within E2EE environments”
  • Austria-based digital forensics firm T3K-Forensics has also won UK government funding to implement its AI-based child sexual abuse detection technology on smartphones to detect newly created material — providing what the government bills as “a toolkit that social platforms can integrate with their E2EE services”

The winning projects will be evaluated at the end of a five month delivery phase by an external evaluator — which the government said will look at success criteria including “commercial viability to determine deployability into the market, and long term impact”.

In a joint statement, DCMS and the Home Office also touted the forthcoming Online Safety Bill — which they claimed will transform how illegal and harmful online content is dealt with by placing a new duty of care on social media and other tech companies towards their UK users.

“This will mean there will be less illegal content such as child sexual abuse and exploitation online and when it does appear it will be removed quicker. The duty of care will still apply to companies that choose to use end-to-end encryption,” they added.

Prior guidance put out by DCMS this summer urged social media and messaging firms to “prevent” the use of e2e encryption on child accounts. So the government appears to be evolving its approach (or its messaging) — and banking on embedded CSAM detection tools being baked into e2e encryption and able to carry out content detection.

Assuming, of course, any of the aforementioned projects delivers the claimed CSAM detection/prevention functionality at acceptable levels of accuracy (i.e. avoiding any ruinous false positives).

Another salient point is the question of whether the novel AI/scanning techs could result in vulnerabilities or even backdoors being baked into e2e encrypted systems — thereby undermining everyone’s security.

There is also the question of whether UK citizens will be happy with state-mandated scanning of their electronic devices — given all the privacy and liberty issues that entails.

While the UK public has generally been happy to get behind the notion of improving online child safety it might be rather less happy to discover that means blanket device scanning — especially if novel technologies end up sending alerts to law enforcement about people’s innocent holiday/bath-time snaps.

The political backlash around misfiring ‘safety’ tech could be swift and substantial.

iPhone maker Apple put the rollout of its own on-device CSAM scanning tech — ‘NeuralHash’ — on hold this fall after a privacy backlash.

UK offers cash for CSAM detection tech targeted at E2E encryption

OTA Insight books $80M for its hospitality business intelligence tools, used by 55K hotel properties globally

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 04:39 AM PST

Travel and tourism, two of the hardest-hit industries in the Covid-19 pandemic, are slowly starting to show some signs of recovery. Now, OTA Insight — a company that builds business intelligence tools for one of the key sectors in that space, hotels — is announcing a round of funding as it too picks up more business on the upswing.

The company has raised $80 million, a Series B led by Spectrum Equity, with previous backers Eight Roads, F-Prime Capital and Highgate Technology Ventures also participating. OTA Insight is not disclosing its valuation, but for some idea of its size and operation, it’s used today by some 55,000 properties; and it has been profitable for years already, including through the pandemic. Founded in 2015, prior to this, OTA Insight had only raised $20 million.

The plan will be to now use this injection of cash to drive more business in what is still a very untapped market, said CEO Sean Fitzpatrick.

“One of the unique things about the hotel and hospitality industry is that generally tech providers focus a lot of their energy on the larger chains, because that’s where they believe the opportunity is,” he said. “But if you look at the addressable market, there are over a million hotel properties, while there’s only about 70,000 chain properties… We have a really good spread between independent family run businesses all the way up to the global chains.”

As big data analytics continues to mature as a discipline, and different sectors become increasingly digitally savvy, we have seen a number of startups emerge with tools catering to specific verticals, company sizes and use cases. (Just earlier this week, Pigment — which provides better forecasting tools to finance teams that have been muddling through with Excel — raised $73 million.)

In the case of OTA Insight, its opportunity is to tap into a group of users — hoteliers — that not only are under new kinds of pressure in terms of the business climate, but have been shifting to, and are now willing to invest in more, digital tools to help them weather that new climate in a better way.

“We see this amazing opportunity, because even though the headlines [for travel] are not great in terms of just the the trajectory of the pandemic, I think over the three to five year horizon, people are really optimistic about travel rebounding, about people’s desire to get out there and have experiences again,” Fitzpatrick said. “We’re seeing really significant inbound interest in terms of investment in hospitality technology, but we’re seeing hotels also really evaluate their own tech stacks, looking for opportunities to maybe do things differently. Things have changed pretty profoundly in the industry, so that’s presenting a very significant opportunity.”

The gap between the interactions that hotels have with their users, and what they understand about those users’ intents is pretty huge. One one side, they check them in, provide them a place to sleep for the night, and potentially lots of other services. On the other, they generally don’t have a lot of visibility into what those users want, or have been searching for online, which sometimes results in a booking with their hotel, and sometimes does not. Direct experience of that was, in fact, some of what drove the founders to start the company: planning a trip to London from Belgium for the Olympics in 2012, Gino Engels and his friends couldn’t find any hotel rooms that weren’t painfully expensive. And yet after they arrived they could see that a lot of hotels had spaces and were drastically dropping prices. They saw that there had to be a better way of managing that. 

OTA Insight today provides various business analytics and BI tools to hotel operators — variously called Market Insight, Rate Insight, Revenue Insight and Parity Insight — to help them figure out how to price and manage room availability, which can in turn be used for their own direct sales, and to manage sales through third-party channels. For now, the company doesn’t resell its tech through aggregators like Booking.com or Airbnb, although you might imagine that one day that could also become an opportunity to expand business, as those platforms also look for better ways to serve their hotel customers.

Part of the Series B will be used to continue investing in OTA Insight’s technology stack. 

"We are very excited about the response from our customers to our latest products and innovations," said Gino Engels, OTA Insight’s co-founder and CCO. "With this investment we will accelerate our expansion across all regions in 2022 but particularly in the Americas, where we have seen an incredible recovery."

Steve LeSieur, an MD at Spectrum Equity who is joining the board with this round, said that bigger market potential is one big reason his firm invested now.

"OTA Insight is at the forefront of delivering real-time insights and broader commercial decision support to an industry that is quickly adopting dynamic intelligence to remain competitive and optimize performance,” he said in a statement to TechCrunch. “We've been impressed by OTA's growth over the last several years, including during the pandemic, resulting in a very strategic customer footprint across the global hotel market. We think the business is very well positioned and just getting started.”

Spotify finally rolls out real-time lyrics to global users

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 04:00 AM PST

After years of ignoring consumer demand for in-app lyrics, particularly in the U.S., Spotify announced today it will make a new Lyrics feature available to all global users, both Free and Premium, across platforms. The feature is powered by lyrics provider Musixmatch, and expands on a prior deal Spotify had with the company to offer lyrics to users in India, Latin America and Southeast Asia.

Last year, Spotify introduced real-time lyrics that sync to the music to users in 26 worldwide markets, after initially testing the feature in 2019. This was the first time 22 of the 26 markets had ever gained any form of lyrics support, the company said at the time. That deal later expanded to 28 markets. Spotify users in Japan have also had access to lyrics through a standalone deal with SyncPower.

But users in other markets have only had access to “Behind the Lyrics,” a feature launched in 2016 in partnership with Genius which offered lyrics interspersed with trivia about the song, its meaning, the artist and other commentary. Meanwhile, through Spotify’s community feedback forum, thousands of users over the years expressed to the company they would prefer a feature that provided real-time lyrics, instead of lyrics that are interrupted with facts and other background information.

Those users will now get their wish.

Spotify confirmed to TechCrunch it will be sunsetting “Behind the Lyrics” to make way for the new Lyrics feature.

Lyrics will be available across platforms from the “Now Playing” view or bar, depending on the platform.

On mobile, users can swipe up from the “Now Playing” screen to see the track’s lyrics scroll by in real time as the song is playing. On the desktop app, you can click the microphone icon from the “Now Playing” bar instead. And on the Spotify TV app, you’ll navigate to the top-right corner of the “Now Playing” view to enable Lyrics from the lyrics button.

The company says the feature will be available on the big screen via its app for PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Android TV, Amazon Fire TV, Samsung, Roku, LG, Sky and Comcast.

The new feature also offers built-in sharing from an included button on the bottom of the screen on mobile, which allows users to select the lyrics they want to share and the destination.

There is no difference in the Lyrics experience for Free or Premium users, we’re told.

Real-time lyrics on music apps have had a complicated history. When lyrics aren’t provided by music publishers, companies turn to a third-party provider. But those providers don’t always play fair. Google, for example, was accused by Genius in 2019 for plagiarizing its lyrics collection, which Genius tracked by cleverly embedding secret codes into its lyrics to spell out “red-handed.” Those lyrics later appeared in Google.com search results. But Google said the blame was with its partner, LyricFind. It didn’t drop its partnership, as there are few alternatives for major lyrics deals — the companies tend to work with either Genius, LyricFind or Musixmatch (or a combination).

That’s why it made headlines when Apple in 2018 announced a partnership with Genius for lyrics across thousands of its top songs, and two years later became the exclusive web player for Genius. Among other services, Pandora says it works with LyricFind and Amazon works with both LyricFind and Musixmatch, its website states.

With this expansion, Lyrics will now be available in all markets where Spotify is offered, eliminating one of the big competitive advantages these rivals have over Spotify.

The company says Lyrics will begin rolling out globally starting today.

iRobot buys air purifier maker Aeris

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 03:30 AM PST

A week ago, we were discussing iRobot's smart home ambitions as they pertain to the company's work with Amazon. The company has been highlighted these plans bit by bit over the past couple of years, in the hopes of unlocking Roomba's potential as a kind of smart home missing link.

Today the company takes a bit of a surprising next step, with the acquisition of Aeris Cleantec AG, a Swiss company best known for its HEPA air purifiers. Certainly the acquisition comports with the company's core focus of cleaning the home, nearly 20 years after the introduction of its first robotic vacuum.

"Today's acquisition of Aeris is an important step in iRobot's strategy to expand our total addressable market and diversify our product portfolio in ways that will provide consumers with new ways to keep their homes cleaner and healthier,” CEO Colin Angle said in a release. "We are enthusiastic about the growth potential for Aeris' products, especially as the pandemic has raised greater consumer awareness of the value of maintaining a cleaner, healthier home. We are also excited about the potential to leverage our Genius Home Intelligence platform and existing ecosystem of home robots to bring the iRobot experience to air purification."

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It's worth noting, as we did last week, that most of iRobot's successful non-Roomba lines have derived from acquisitions, including Braava and Root, which were purchased by the company in 2012 and 2019, respectively.

Air purification is undoubtedly a topic that's been at top of mind over the past two years, courtesy of the pandemic. Though, even prior to this, the category was booming, with the advent of things like connected smart home filters. Aeris' flagship products the Lite and 3-in-1 Pro both offer a connected smartphone app for monitoring device health, as well as controlling multiple connected machines.

That last bit likely provides a glimpse into iRobot's bigger plans. Without its own smart speaker, the company is almost certainly looking for some manner of smart home device that can serve as a connected beacon. That's something that could potentially — albeit expensively — be served by air purifiers. Perhaps down the road we might also see Aeris' purification technology built into Roomba docking stations.

The deal has already closed, according to iRobot, with the company paying $72 million in cash for Aeris. “In addition to this initial cash consideration,” the company notes, “the deal has a provision to pay a modest performance-based earn-out should Aeris achieve certain targets next year.”

Remojo is building tools to combat digital addiction, starting with porn

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 03:11 AM PST

Startups geared towards men’s sexual health have been doing a brisk trade for a few years now. But while the early wave of tech businesses mostly aimed to provide (easier) access to pharmaceuticals for treating health issues like erectile dysfunction (e.g. Roman), perhaps also offering hormone tests and bespoke vitamins claimed to reduce hair loss or boost libido (Manual) — and with some branching into broader telemedicine plays over time (Ro) — more recently the category has expanded to dial up attention on men’s mental health too.

It’s a welcome — and some might say, long overdue — development.

Here the UK seems to be a bit of a hotbed of entrepreneurial activity. Back in September, for example, we covered a seed round for UK-based Mojo, a subscription service for men’s sexual well-being, touting therapy instead of pills as the answer to erectile dysfunction.

And while not exclusively for men, UK-based Paired is offering couples therapy via an app.

Well, here’s another UK-based subscription service with a holistic approach to men’s sexual well-being and self care — founded in the same year as Mojo (2019): The similarly named Remojo offers tech tools and in-app programs to support men with sexual health concerns — with a first focus on helping people quit porn. (Hence ‘Re’mojo.)

Paired pulls in $3.6M to encourage more couples to get cosy with app-based relationship care

Take a spin around Remojo’s website and its marketing soon implies a range of benefits could flow from quitting porn — not just time and attention saved but better in-person relationships and even, potentially, a resolution to health problems like erectile dysfunction. So there looks to be a fair amount of overlap in this burgeoning male sexual well-being space.

Aside from variations in pricing (Remojo’s subscription plans are cheaper than Mojo’s), the initial difference mostly seems to be one of emphasis; aka, how to get men interested in the first place.

On that it seems a fair bet that more men consume porn than suffer from erectile dysfunction. Although Remojo’s target is men who both watch porn and want to stop. But sole founder, Jack Jenkins, is quick to emphasize that the subscription service isn’t only for men with porn addiction.

Rather he says it’s designed to address a full spectrum of reasons why guys might want to stop consuming pornography — from simple self improvement (and wanting to get more control over what’s playing on their minds); to those who find their porn consumption habits are getting in the way of real life (and real relationships); to guys with religious convictions who feel shame around using porn, however rarely they may do it, and want help to live up to a sought for spiritual standard.

Per Jenkins, a key cohort of Remojo’s users are thus Christians, Muslims and Hindus looking for help to live up to religious ideals — and maybe also seeking a non-judgmental support community for an issue that can be taboo for them to talk about in their usual social circles.

Remojo says it’s getting circa 50,000 signups per month for its subscription programs (which cost $4.99 for one month; or less if you sign up for the 3-month or year-long plan) — with users hailing from all over the world (at least where Internet access is easy) — suggesting porn consumption is a very universal concern.

Currently, Remojo’s biggest markets are the US, UK, Brazil and India. Content in the app is in English so it’s also growing in other English-speaking markets, per Jenkins. While the typical Remojo user is a guy aged between 16-35 — aka, a digital native who’s “grown up with instant access to porn at all times”.

With traction like that it’s also, unsurprisingly, attracting interest from investors.

Over the past 12 months, Jenkins says Remojo has raised £1.6 million (~$2.1M) in pre-seed funding from a number of business angels, including Jens Lapinski (former TechStars Berlin MD and CEO of Angel Invest) and Jag Singh (also of TechStars Berlin and Angel Invest), along with a number of other angels in the banking/finance space, plus some (unnamed) founders chipping in.

It’s now in the process of raising a Series A, according to Jenkins — who says it’s targeting £5M-£6M (~$6.7M-$8M) and expecting to close the round “by January” (hence he says they’ll “probably” skip a seed and go straight for the A).

Remojo’s website touts what it bills as a “90 day reboot” — which it says is its most popular subscription plan — for quitting porn.

If the tech really works that would imply major user churn every three months. But the stickiness and easy accessibility of online porn means relapsing is a perennial risk and a blocker tool is always likely to be helpful, argues Jenkins. So he doesn’t sound at all concerned about revenues drying up (i.e. from succeeding in its mission of getting men to hard quit porn).

In-app courses are another way for Remojo to provide broader, on-going utility and appeal — hence it’s offering support for other aspects of men’s sexual health and well-being; which may have been linked to (and negatively affected by) their consumption of porn (but which won’t necessarily instantly improve if/when they do stop).

Jenkins bootstrapped the business himself initially — launching an MVP which let users custom block content on their smartphones to cut off access to sources of porn.

Now the software is available cross-device, for Android, iOS, Windows and macOS. And it bakes in a lot more than a simple adult content blocker that puts up a literal barrier to accessing online porn — such as the aforementioned behavioral change courses, CBT techniques and a wider support community.

Future features in the works include AI-driven porn content identification to enhance the software’s powers of blocking/filtration, with Jenkins saying it’s working on developing models that will use computer vision and audio to detect pornography viewing as it’s in progress so that the software will be able to intervene in real-time too.

The current mix blends custom blocking with supportive resources.

“It’s a hybrid of a few things. You’ve got research around habit formation and habit breaking — using the findings and principles from that field. We have our in-app content director [Noah Church] has been coaching people to get free from porn addiction for seven years — he’s got a YouTube channel where he’s been delivering courses and coaching [for years],” Jenkins tells TechCrunch.

“One of the foundations of the structure of the app is the ‘choice model’ — which was the recovery model developed by [Dr] Paula Hall — who’s one of the leading experts, if not the leading expert, on porn and sex addiction in the UK.”

Other bits Remojo folds into its behavioral change mix are practical user insights from the program; access to an anonymous support community of others; and tools for users to track progress and be helped to stay committed/accountable (such as an accountability partner and install/PIN protection).

A core component of its program is to start the user with a full ‘reboot’ — aka a period of sustained abstinence from consuming porn (where Remojo’s blocking tools and accountability features clearly play a key role). The idea is to help guys get space to develop alternative habits — and here its suggestions for filling the hole left by not consuming porn includes stuff like mindfulness, exercise and participation in (porn-free) hobbies.

Jenkins says the overarching goal is changing mindsets/thinking patterns — and male self improvement more generally — hence course content covers related/follow-on areas, such as habit change, addiction recovery and overcoming sexual dysfunction (where it’s overlapping with Mojo).

Future course content is also slated to cover broader areas like dating and help with improving a relationship/sex life with a partner, as well as courses that will aim to tailor advice for specific religious beliefs.

“And for people that are maybe in a more difficult place, [we offer help with] building a more fulfilling life so that they don’t need something like porn to fill an emotional hole,” he adds.

While some porn users may have deeper psychological issues linked to their use (such as childhood abuse), Jenkins argues that porn consumption itself may not have any deeper significance than being a “convenient” release. So it’s not always necessary to psychologize consumption.

The app therefore aims to avoid judging — putting its focus on simply supporting men to regain control over their time and attention. And, well, sticking it to the attention-sucking porn industry in the process.

“[Porn use is] not necessarily driven by any deep psychological issue — it’s just very stimulating, very compulsive material that just taps into people’s fundamental evolutionary drives and just hijacks it. So people can end up just watching porn purely because it’s just there and it’s so compelling,” he argues.

“This problem is so universally shared. It’s basically almost all men under 35 — everywhere around the world, religious, non-religious. It’s just a huge issue and it’s very, very difficult to generalize,” he adds of the pull of online porn. “You can have people who might have such a severe addiction that they might be watching porn from anything like 3-7 hours a day all the way through to someone who maybe you’re a Muslim and you watch it once a month but that’s a huge problem for you because Islam has zero tolerance for that. And it’s affecting your self esteem and disconnecting you from god and so on.

“So the spectrum is so broad that it’s very difficult to generalize. I think what’s really gratifying for me and the team is all the different stories, comments, reviews we get from people about how their life’s changing — and in different ways.”

Zooming out for a sec, concern about online porn viewing is something of a decade+ preoccupation of the UK government at this point — one that’s now driving ministers to implement sweeping online safety legislation, fuelled by a concern over the harms caused to children by easy access to inappropriate content online.

Remojo’s premise is, similarly, that if guys are exposed to limitless porn from a very young age it sets them up for problems with a range of sexual well-being issues later on (and, well, 50k men a month does suggest it’s onto something.)

An earlier attempt by the UK government to mandate age verification for accessing adult websites faltered, back in 2019, after a backlash over security and privacy concerns, and the viability of imposing and regulating age checks.

Guys opting into their own custom porn blocker and support-to-quit community (for a fee) certainly looks a lot easier to implement.

Jenkins says he formulated the idea for an app-based support tool for quitting porn after deciding to make the switch himself — not because he was addicted to porn but rather as “a conscious choice to live better and be my absolute best”.

It was while he was looking for support to quit that he came across subreddits with over a million users also seeking the same kind of support — and from there he started to realize the scale of the problem and the potential business opportunity.

“I started the process of quitting and cutting porn from my life completely and started looking for something to just put up a guardrail — and just block it and filter out all of that content on phones and computers, and there wasn’t really anything good out there,” he recounts. “So, being somewhat entrepreneurial, I started exploring the problem more — I thought I can’t be the only guy who wants to do this or who’s feeling like this — and so I started reaching out to people on Reddit through DMs who were actively talking about quitting porn, or porn addiction, or just problems with porn and the affect it has on their lives.

“I started doing interviews with them and I was blown away by — one — how many people were talking about it on Reddit. So there’s about 1.3 million people in subreddits just dedicated to, basically, quitting porn; and then also how eager they were to speak to me and share all kinds of person stories and information and how desperate they were for a solution.”

“After doing that initial user discovery I just started work on it immediately — in December 2019 — because I’d never seen that level of problem validation before for any idea that I’d ever had,” he adds.

“It started out being about blocking and then, over time, my understanding of the problem that people are facing — and actually how you help them make the behaviour change — break the habit or break the addiction, just change their behavior and how they think — there’s much more to it than just blocking.”

Just as Mojo is hoping that treatment for erectile dysfunction can be a way to reach men with wider therapy offers (including support for porn addiction), Remojo also intends its tools to be more expansive: Jenkins says it’s aiming to replicate the app-based framework it’s devising for porn so it can be reskinned and applied to tackle a range of “modern, behavioral, digital addictions and compulsions that no one’s really dealing with” — from online gambling to social media and computer gaming addiction.

“We’re going to use our framework to help people quit gambling, quit compulsive gaming and also reduce or cut social media. These will be separate brands but using the same technology, the same framework to guide people to better habits or complete abstinence from those things as well,” he says. “The exact same framework applies — we would just really change the in-app courses. But the rest of the system is exactly the same in terms of what works for habit change, behavior change and overcoming these digital addictions.”

So maybe — ultimately — Remojo will also be building products targeted at women.

(It’s also yet another sign of how far attitudes around social media have skewed negative that quitting porn and quitting Facebook are being uttered in the same breath.)

Another development on its roadmap is to create its own custom OS — one that’s minimalist by nature and aims to put the user in control over all the digital things trying to gobble up their attention.

“We want to build a custom operating system for Android phones and also for desktop devices,” he tells us, saying it will use some of the forthcoming Series A funding to start work on that with the goal, ultimately, of “releasing a handset for digital minimalists with all of these digital wellness controls built into the operating system itself”. Though that’s likely further out.

The plan for the next 12 months — when Remojo expects to be flush with Series A cash — will also be to dial up its messaging.

On that, Jenkins says it wants to “start a global conversation” to change many more minds about porn consumption — and try to normalize the notion of quitting porn so it becomes as ‘vanilla’ and unremarkable as a person saying they don’t drink or smoke.

“What we’ll be looking to do with the Series A is… break the taboo around the topic. And make this as normal and widely accepted as saying you don’t drink, you don’t smoke, you don’t eat meat and so on. Make this lifestyle choice an acceptable mainstream topic or choice,” he adds.

Mojo, a men’s sexual health startup that’s pushing therapy not pills, gets $4.4M seed

Manual raises £5M to build its well-being guide for men

Nigeria’s Kippa gets $3.2M pre-seed for its small business finance management app

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 12:05 AM PST

Millions of small businesses globally, especially in emerging markets, have stayed offline for the better part of the past decade. Due to that, most of them still rely on scribbles using pen and paper or ledgers for bookkeeping and storing important information.

In Nigeria, some go to the extent of keeping information offhand. All these inefficiencies, asides from being time-consuming, lead to errors and affects cash flow and finance, which is why almost nine out of 10 small businesses in the country fizzle out in the first five years.

Nigerian startup Kippa, attempting to improve the life cycle of these small businesses with its finance management app, has raised $3.2 million in pre-seed funding.

The startup's new financing round was led by Berlin-based VC Target Global. Entrée Capital, Alter Global and Rally Cap Ventures are the other participating VCs.

A number of angel investors — Babs Ogundeyi, Kuda CEO; Sriram Krishnan, an investor in Khatabook; Raffael Johnen, Auxmoney CEO; Chris Bouwer; Kyane Kassiri; Edward Suh of Goodwater Capital; and Sajid Rahman — invested in the startup.

Kippa works as a simple app where small business owners can keep track of their daily income and expense transactions, create invoices and receipts, manage inventory and generally monitor how their businesses ebb and flow over time.

One of the app's most important features, according to the company, is that it helps merchants keep track of debtors and send automated reminders to them. The company claims that merchants who use Kippa this way "recover debts 3x faster."

Most of these features are geared at onboarding a wide range of businesses in Nigeria to the platform; however, the strategy is to introduce credit and other financial services to them.

There is a cultural nuance to this, co-founder and CEO Kennedy Ekezie tells TechCrunch. The majority of transactions carried out by small businesses are cash-based, and more than 30% of sales happen on credit. So, at its core, the biggest problem businesses face is not the absence of bookkeeping or tools but the dearth of working capital or credit.

"For us, what we do is we have such a unique opportunity to provide financial services to users. For most of them, Kippa is the first B2B SaaS app that they're using," said the CEO, who started the company with Duke Ekezie and Jephthah Uche.

"And we do have a unique opportunity to help them accept online digital payments, to provide them with working capital, digital savings and plug them into the financial ecosystem."

Many startups solving various needs of small businesses and startups have launched with bold promises this past year — all with different approaches; some want to manage bookkeeping, some are keen on connecting small businesses with suppliers, others provide banking and software services.

But in reality, they all converge at one point, which is providing access to credit. CEO Ekezie says while this holds true, Kippa is "choosing to be digitally native, rather than pursue the digitization of analogue processes that previous players have done." And that sets the company apart, according to the founder.

As Kippa remains free for businesses to use at the moment, the introduction of credit and other financial services will see the company make revenue by taking commission fees or interests off lending or working capital.

The bookkeeping and finance app claims to have grown an average of 126% month-on-month since launching in June. With over 130,000 active businesses, ranging from small kiosks and street corner shops to local food vendors and high-end merchants using the app, Kippa claims to have recorded more than $300 million in the past five months.

For lead investor Target Global, these metrics indicate a strong need for the product in the Nigerian market; consequently, that's why it invested. According to Lina Chong, the firm's investment director, "Our investment in Kippa will enable it to grow and be the first-choice financial management solution for small businesses in Africa."

Ekezie and his co-founders started Kippa in February 2021. Before Kippa, the trio founded Africave, a software talent matching platform in 2019 that shuttered last year.

According to Ekezie, they moved on from Africave after recognizing imminent supply constraints that would put a cap on the company's growth.

The CEO said the founders sought to solve another problem they felt was perfect for their strengths. After embarking on a founder-market-fit tour and meeting several small business owners across Nigeria to understand their pain points, Kippa was born.

"What we saw was a lot of them operating very manually using the ledgers, spending one hour or more at the end of the day balancing their books, making mistakes, cancelling out, complaining of their records being incomplete," said Ekezie.

"And we saw a bigger problem — which is the biggest problem small businesses face — the lack of access to credit or financing to run properly. So we thought that was an interesting enough problem to solve."

The team also spoke with founders and some founding team members of similar players in other emerging markets such as India's Khatabook, Colombia's Treinta, Indonesia's BukuWarung and Bukukas to understand how they scaled their businesses.

And though there are some similarities, Ekezie believes he and his team have rewired Kippa to adapt to the needs of businesses in Nigeria. For instance, whereas Khatabook and other players are digitizing bookkeeping processes first before anything else, Kippa is solving broader access to finance problems.

Kippa's pre-seed round, one of the largest in Nigeria and sub-Saharan Africa, will be invested in growing its merchant base, improving its product, scaling the team, and venturing into financial services.

India’s Khatabook raises $100 million for its bookkeeping platform for merchants

Cron is a new calendar app following in Sunrise’s footsteps

Posted: 18 Nov 2021 12:00 AM PST

Meet Cron, a new calendar app for the Mac that wants to bring some innovation to this space. The startup directly mentions Sunrise as an inspiration for those of you who still remember it. Sunrise used to be a popular calendar product that was acquired by Microsoft.

Cron has attended Y Combinator's winter back of 2020 and has raised a $3.5 million seed round in March 2020. Garry Tan from Initialized Capital is leading the round, with various business angels also participating. Some of those investors include Elad Gil, Figma founder Dylan Field, former LinkedIn CEO Jeff Weiner and Sunrise co-founder Jeremy Le Van.

If you look at the company's website, there's no feature page and no download link. "We haven't really announced the company and the product yet. We're kinda in semi-stealth," Cron founder Raphael Schaad told me.

I haven't used the app myself, but Schaad shared his screen during a call so that I could see the app with my own eyes. While it isn't ready for prime time just yet, it already looks like a well-designed calendar app with a couple of nifty features.

More importantly, it feels like a strong foundation for additional features that could differentiate Cron from other calendar apps out there.

"I started scheduling meetings with myself," Schaad said. "I was thinking I should build a layer on top of the calendar," he added. But first, he realized he couldn't build a layer on top of the calendar without a proper calendar app that handles multiple time zones, meetings with other people, notifications, etc.

Image Credits: Cron

The main Cron window looks like a calendar app with a week view in the center, a tiny month view in the corner and a list of active calendars on the left. If you've used Apple Calendar, you're going to feel right at home.

Cron also features a column on the right side of the main window. When you click on an event, you get details about the event in that column. From there, you can change the time and date, add a participant, add a conference link and more.

Whenever you change the duration of an event or move it to another day, the week view gets updated in real-time so that you can see how it affects your week before hitting Enter.

If you haven't selected an event, it shows the next event with a button to join the meeting if there's a video-conferencing URL attached to the event. Cron supports Google Meet, Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Whereby, BlueJeans, Around, Skype and Google Duo. If you’re a Fantastical user, you’re probably already using that feature every day.

Cron lets you create an event quickly with a command menu. You can hit a keyboard shortcut and start scheduling the event with natural language. You can also search for events or people from that menu.

There are a couple of features that I find particularly interesting. First, you can share availability in an email conversation or a WhatsApp conversation quite easily.

Most scheduling features in calendar involve generating a link with a bunch of availabilities. It doesn't work well as you can't quickly see when someone is available without clicking the link first.

In Cron, you can hit a keyboard shortcut to enter a different mode called 'Share availability'. After that, you can select time blocks in your calendar directly. It generates a text block that you can copy and paste in Gmail, Messages or whatever you're using to talk with someone — text is still the most universal protocol after all.

It looks like this:

Would 30 mins during any of these times (all Central European Time) work for you?

  • Mon Nov 8, 11 AM – 12:30 PM, or 1:30-4 PM
  • Tue Nov 9, 8:30-10 AM, or 11 AM – 12 PM

And Cron works better as a team as you can see when your coworkers are available from Cron directly. In the sidebar, you can add someone you're working with. After that, it works pretty much like another calendar.

You can show and hide their calendar to see when they should be available. You can also click on their name in order to drag and drop their name in your calendar to create an event with them.

Schaad has a big vision for his startup. "We want to build the time layer of the internet," he said. Right now, Cron is available to some users in early access and the app only supports Google accounts. But it should be available soon to everyone with support for Microsoft and iCloud accounts.

It's still the early days of the company but it's going to be interesting to follow Cron's updates to see how it evolves. Some people are still going to prefer Fantastical as it's a polished, native app for Apple platforms. But it's good to see that there could be an opinionated alternative.

Image Credits: Cron

Streamlabs changes its name after backlash from Twitch stars and open source software maker

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 11:21 PM PST

One of the most popular streaming software makers is in hot water after being called out by top Twitch personalities and the open source project that served as a backbone for the company’s success.

Streamlabs, formerly Streamlabs OBS, changed its name Wednesday after backlash spread on Twitter against the company over alleged sketchy business practices. The OBS Project, short for Open Broadcaster Software, provided the open source technical framework for Streamlabs. But in spite of Streamlabs’ decision to include “OBS” in its name, the company and the open source project were apparently never on good terms.

According to a tweet from the OBS Project, the open source group previously asked Streamlabs not to include “OBS” in its name at launch. Streamlabs ignored the request, a choice that likely led many of the software’s users to assume the two products were closely affiliated. To make matters even more confusing, Logitech actually owns Streamlabs, after buying the company for $89 million back in 2019.

On Tuesday, Streamlabs launched a new console Twitch streaming tool called Streamlabs Studio for Xbox. Lightstream, a rival livestreaming software maker, stirred up the current controversy on Twitter when its CEO pointed out the striking similarities between Streamlabs’ webpage for the console streaming tool and its own, right down to the word-for-word identical user testimonials. Capture card maker Elgato also chimed in on Twitter, suggesting that the company had its own experience with Streamlabs copying a product.

A few huge Twitch names quickly jumped into the controversy, including political streamer Hasan Piker and Pokimane, one of the most followed streamers in the world. “Streamlabs better resolve this entire thread of issues or i'll be asking them to take my face off the platform [and] look to use another donation service,” Pokimane (Imane Anys) tweeted. Less than a day later, Streamlabs announced that it would “[take] immediate action to remove OBS from our name.”

Streamlabs launches Crossclip, a new tool for sharing Twitch clips to TikTok, Instagram and YouTube

Streamlabs launches a ‘link in bio’ website builder that includes tipping

Google Pay to add Hinglish support in India, enable merchants to create digital storefronts

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 11:20 PM PST

Google will roll out support for Hinglish, a mix of Hindi and English, and a range of additional features to its payments app Google Pay in India as the global tech giant makes further push to expand its reach in the South Asian market.

"For technology to truly fulfill its purpose of transforming lives and economies, it's critical that we never lose sight of building universally helpful products that work for everyone regardless of their preferred language or fluency," said Ambarish Kenghe, VP of Google Pay, at a virtual event Thursday.

The support for Hinglish, which is spoken by over 350 million people in India, is one of the many new features Google is working to roll out in the South Asian market, said Kenghe. The firm will also ship a feature later this year that will allow users to easily split an expense with friends and family, he said.

Users will also be able to soon fill details such as bank account information for merchant payments with voice. "You can say it in Hindi or English, we will automatically figure it out," he said.

Google Pay, launched in India four years ago, has become one of the top peer-to-peer payments apps in the world's second largest internet market. Catering to merchants and businesses has been one of the major focuses for Google with the payments app, which was formerly known as Tez.

Kenghe said more than 10 million merchants in India today use Google Pay. To make further inroads with this segment, the company announced My Shop that will help merchants create online storefronts on the Google Pay app “within minutes.”

Merchants will be able to use a predefined template to quickly showcase their inventory on the app, he said. They will also be able to add information such as their business hours and delivery offerings.

Image Credits: Google

Having an online storefront on Google Pay will allow merchants to have discoverability on Google Maps and Google Search as well, he said. The feature will roll out later this month in India.

Four years ago, a coalition of retail banks launched a payments infrastructure called UPI in India that supports interoperability and charges no money for transactions. The country, which was already seeing a fast adoption of mobile payments, dramatically accelerated those adoption with UPI.

Today, the system processes 3.6 billion transactions each month — and Google recommended the U.S. Federal Reserve to implement a similar real-time payments platform in the country in 2019.

"As exhilarating as these last few years have been for digital payments for India, we are still very much at the beginning. As India sets new standards for future payments across the global, we look forward to playing our part and using technology to create greater economic opportunity for everyone in India," he said.

Google launches $15M financial assistance program in India, partners with SIDBI to offer loans to businesses

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 10:27 PM PST

Google has formed a key partnership to help provide loans to micro and small businesses in India, the firm announced at its annual event for the South Asian market.

The company said it has partnered with Small Industries Development Bank of India, the country's apex regulatory body for overall licensing and regulation of micro, small and medium enterprise finance, to launch a $15 million financial assistance program to deliver timely micro credit to enterprises.

The loans, which will be disbursed by SIDBI, will be offered at "competitive interest rates," and its ticket size will range from 25 lakhs Indian rupees ($33,728) to 1 crore ($135,000). Eligible firms will be using the loan to finance purchases of new equipment and machinery, scaling their production infrastructure and fulfilling their working capital needs, said Shalini Puchalapalli, Director of Customer Solutions at Google India, at the event.

"With today's announcement, we believe that working with the broader ecosystem we can drive a wide-ranging positive social impact. We also hope that this will encourage more organizations to invest in public-private partnerships and further strengthen our economy," she said.

The program will prioritize women-owned businesses and those that are engaged in production of equipment for the country's fight against the pandemic, she added.

“Today, we feel proud that SIDBl’s efforts in reviving the sector are backed by a strong collaboration with Google,” said Sivasubramanian Ramann, Chairman and Managing Director of SIDBI, at the virtual event.

Google, which last year committed to invest $10 billion in India over the course of five to seven years, is the latest tech giant to explore helping disburse loans to businesses in India.

In August, Facebook launched a similar program to help small and medium-sized businesses secure loans in the South Asian market. Facebook has inked tieups with lending partners to grant small ticket loans — ranging between 500,000 Indian rupees ($6,720) to 50,00,000 ($67,200) — at a predefined interest rate of 17%-20% per annum.

Paytm makes market debut following India’s largest IPO

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 09:15 PM PST

Indian fintech giant Paytm, backed by SoftBank and Alibaba, fell by more than 20% after its debut trading on local exchanges Thursday. The firm, which raised $2.5 billion in India’s largest initial public offering, is valued at about $14.9 billion, compared to $20 billion valuation the firm was aiming for.

Shares of One97 Communications, the holding firm of Paytm, traded for as low as 1,591 Indian rupees ($21.4), down from the offer price of 2,150 Indian rupees.

Thursday’s IPO is the latest in a series of listings by Indian startups as many begin to explore the public markets following years of growth. Indian food delivery startup Zomato, online insurance aggregator Policybazaar, and fashion commerce Nykaa have made stellar debut in the public market this year.

Compared to those of its peers, the early hours trading for Paytm shares has been disappointing so far. But many industry executives said that day one performance of shares is not the best measure to assess the success of Paytm, which offers a range of services including peer-to-peer payments and a digital bank.

Even as One97 Communications started its journey two decades ago, Paytm was conceived in the past decade.

A decade ago, Vijay Shekhar Sharma flew to Hong Kong to attend an All Things D conference. At the event, he watched Silicon Valley executives Jack Dorsey and Brian Chesky talk about the firms they were building. But the conversation that would change the trajectory of his firm, One97 Communications, was an interview of Alibaba founder Jack Ma.

"That trip taught me what was happening in the mobile payments and commerce spaces in Asia. It was so inspiring to hear Jack Ma speak at the event," said Sharma in an interview with TechCrunch ahead of the listing.

For the first 10 years of its existence, One97 Communications offered a range of services including domain name registration and VAS for telecom firms. The firm had raised $15 million and was profitable, but Sharma was now convinced that he needed to make a move into payments, he recalled in the interview.

But it was a tough sell for Sharma, as many of his investors wanted him to continue to focus on existing lines of business, according to several people familiar with the matter. After some back and forth with investors, and putting some of his shares on the line, Sharma was given the green light to pursue his ambitious experiment.

That experiment turned out to be a success. Paytm chronicles the mobile payments adoption in India today. "This is not Paytm getting listed. This is India's youth getting listed," said Sharma.

The journey for Paytm even after getting the green light wasn't easy. Over the years, the startup struggled to raise funds and received several buyout offers including from Freecharge and Snapdeal — all of which it dismissed, according to sources familiar with the matter.

“The support I have received from the industry, from users and everyone else has been unbelievable,” said Sharma.

Paytm today competes with a range of firms including Google, PhonePe, and Facebook, nearly all of which have gained traction in recent years.

At stake is a fast-growing payments market that could be worth $1 trillion in a few years, up from about $200 billion in 2019, according to Credit Suisse.

Baidu’s robotaxi service aims to be in 100 cities by 2030

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 08:04 PM PST

Baidu keeps ramping up its autonomous driving ambitions. The Chinese tech company made its name in search engines and still relies greatly on search ads for revenues. But it’s hoping that its heavy bet on autonomous driving will pay off down the road.

Apollo Go, Baidu’s robotaxi service, aims to be in 65 cities by 2025 and 100 cities by 2030, the firm’s co-founder and CEO Robin Li said on an analyst call Wednesday.

That’s a big batch of licenses that Baidu needs to obtain from local regulators. And eventually, the business’s sustainability comes down to how many of these permits grant commercial operations to Apollo Go, and how many rides the service could actually garner.

For now, Li estimated that Baidu is “probably the largest robotaxi service provider in the world by number of rides.” In the third quarter alone, Baidu offered 115,000 rides, and Li expected the number for Q4 to be “much larger than the reported number you can hear anywhere else in the world.”

In terms of improving its driving tech, Baidu has so far racked up over 16 million kilometers (10 million miles) of L4, self-driven distance. That’s up from 6.2 million miles reporterd in its first-quarter results.

These enormous figures, however, have limited substance unless we know how many of these rides actually happen on busy city roads rather than designated routes in enclosed areas.

Like most autonomous vehicle companies in China, Baidu is carving out a commercial robotaxi operation while supplying its advanced driving assistance tech to automakers and OEMs.

Baidu has been providing driving solutions to auto companies via its open-sourced Apollo platform since 2017. While the platform has accumulated hundreds of enterprise users, Baidu has fostered closer ties with certain partners. For example, it set up a joint venture with China’s Geely to form electric vehicle maker Jidu Auto, into which the partners would plow 50 billion yuan ($7.7 billion).

Chinese tech giant Baidu begins publicly testing Apollo Go robotaxis in Shanghai

Grammarly raises $200M at a $13B valuation to make you an even better writer using AI

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 07:00 PM PST

Grammarly, the popular auto-editing tool for writing, has raised $200 million in funding at a $13 billion valuation from new investors including Baillie Gifford and funds and accounts managed by BlackRock, among others. The company plans to use the investment to accelerate product innovation and team growth.

“We believe this funding round is a great validation of our business strength,” Rahul Roy-Chowdhury, Grammarly’s global head of product, told TechCrunch in an interview. “We’ve been cash flow positive from the very early days. The round also validates the strength of our mission to improve lives through improving communication. This funding round comes in the context of product innovation and product scaling.”

Roy-Chowdhury says Grammarly plans to use the funding to continue making investments in its AI technology. The company will also continue to advance its natural language processing and machine learning tech to deliver personalized communication feedback to its users. Roy-Chowdhury also noted that Grammarly plans to make additional investments to earn and strengthen user trust.

“Looking ahead, I see so much potential because, at the end of the day, it always comes back to our mission of improving communication. There’s so much change in how work gets done with remote-first global teams trying to work together. We see a huge opportunity to help people with these changing scenarios communicate more effectively. This new funding is only going to help us accelerate our efforts to do that,” he said.

As for the company’s vision for the future of the service, Roy-Chowdhury noted that Grammarly will move past simply focusing on conciseness, consistency, and correctness. The company plans to add new categories in which to offer suggested improvements, while also working to become more ubiquitous.

Grammarly is already scaling its product offerings and achieving its goal towards ubiquity with the launch of Grammarly for Mac and Windows earlier this week. The new desktop application can be used on apps such as Microsoft Office, Slack, Discord, Jira, and more. Roy-Chowdhury says the new desktop app aims to be users’ go-to writing tool wherever they type, as the service is now able to break out of technical barriers associated with browser extensions.

Image Credits: Grammarly

“With Grammarly for Mac and Windows, we can now tie everything together and help you with the entirety of your communication flow. With this, we are present everywhere you communicate and can help you achieve your outcomes more effectively,” Roy-Chowdhury stated.

Grammarly also recently announced the launch of Grammarly for Developers with the rollout of its Text Editor SDK (software development kit), which enables programmers to embed Grammarly text editing functionality into any web application. The beta release of this SDK gives developers access to the full power of Grammarly automated editing with a couple of lines of code. Although users of the target application don't need to be Grammarly customers, if they do happen to be, they can log into their Grammarly accounts and access all of the functionality that comes with that.

The company’s latest funding round follows Grammarly’s previous one in October 2019, when it raised $90 million at a valuation of over $1 billion. This round was led by General Catalyst, which had also helped lead its only other round, for $110 million in May 2017, with participation from previous investor IVP and other unnamed backers.

Today, Grammarly works across more than 500,000 applications and websites including email clients, enterprise software, and word processors. The company says as more people are connecting across more online platforms, it’s important to get communication right in order to achieve individual and business goals, which is what it aims to help its users accomplish.

“As the world has digitized, people communicate more than they ever have—yet it has never been so difficult," said Peter Singlehurst, head of private companies at Baillie Gifford, in a statement. "Grammarly is one of the few businesses in the world focused on solving this problem. What attracted us is the company's vision and the team's ability to drive the product forward to help more people in more situations communicate better. Grammarly's long-term and ambitious approach also aligns with our approach to investing.”

Grammarly operates on a freemium model, where paid tiers give users more tools beyond grammar and spelling checks to include things like word choice, sentence rewrites, tone adjustments, fluency, formality level, and plagiarism detection. The paid tiers are priced at $12, $20, and $30 per month.

Rocket Lab’s Electron booster splashes down in the Pacific Ocean

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 06:38 PM PST

Rocket Lab's reusability program advanced one more step on Wednesday night when the company recovered the booster from its Electron launcher for the third time.

The successful mission comes after a period of delays due to weather, but all went according to plan, with the "Love at First Insight" mission taking off at 8:39 PM EST from the company's launch facility on New Zealand's Mahia Peninsula. Separation occurred at around 8:41 PM EST and the first stage splashing down at around 9:24 PM EST, according to a tweet from Rocket Lab CEO Peter Beck.

Rocket Lab has successfully recovered the first-stage booster twice in its history – the only other company besides SpaceX to achieve reusability. The first successful recovery took place November 2020 and then again in May 2021, though that latter mission resulted in the destruction of the payload.

Like those flights, this booster made a splashdown via parachute. But the recovery included an additional element: the presence of a helicopter, which hovered near the splashdown area to track and observe the booster as it made its descent. While the helicopter didn't actually do anything related to the recovery, its presence is significant, as it indicates that Rocket Lab is also a step closer to executing its ultimate reusability plan: using a parachute to slow the velocity of the booster and capturing it mid-air with a helicopter.

The Electron sent two BlackSky Earth geospatial imaging satellites to low Earth orbit, part of a rapid five-launch agreement on behalf of BlackSky between Rocket Lab and launch services provider Spaceflight Inc. These satellites were originally scheduled to go to LEO in August, part of a three-launch schedule that ended up being delayed due to a small resurgence of the coronavirus in New Zealand and subsequent lockdown measures.

The two BlackSky satellites will join seven others already in orbit, as the geospatial intelligence company's aims to grow its constellation to 14 satellites by the end of this year. Earlier this year, two BlackSky satellites were lost due to a significant anomaly that occurred shortly after the Electron's second-stage ignited.

This mission marks Rocket Lab's twenty-second Electron launch and the fifth mission this year.

Rewatch the launch here:

Sequoia Capital India, 120 angel investors back former Google execs’ consumer finance startup Arbo Works

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 04:25 PM PST

A team of Google executives, many of whom worked with one another for years, left the company earlier this year to launch a startup. The fintech firm, Arbo Works, has raised a financing round led by Sequoia Capital India, the two said Thursday.

Arbo Works, spearheaded by Caesar Sengupta, said on Thursday 120 angel investors, many from Google, participated in the seed financing round. “This group includes CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, founders of successful startups, senior executives from tech and financial institutions, and deep practitioners of AI and ML,” he said.

The startup isn't disclosing the size of the round, but two sources familiar with the matter told TechCrunch that it's an eight-figure investment.

Sengupta, who previously led Google's Next Billion Users program and is pictured above, told TechCrunch in an interview that the funds give Arbo Works runway for several years. "It's a very significant round," he said.

Arbo Works has eight co-founders, all of whom previously worked at Google. In fact, on its website, Arbo Works has listed 21 teammates, 20 of whom previously worked at Google (and many worked on the company's payments product).

"We all have enjoyed working with each other. It sounds weird to say this, but I would continue to work with them anywhere, even if it is selling bananas," he said laughingly. "Even as Google is a large company, a lot of this group formed around Sundar (Pichai, the company’s chief executive), working on Chrome OS. The group stayed together; in fact, many moved to Asia when I came here," he said.

Arbo Works team. Image Credits: Arbo Works

So what is Arbo, which has set up headquarters in Singapore and the U.S., working on? Sengupta is hesitant to share just yet. But he offered some context around the opportunity the startup sees. Sengupta, who worked and launched peer-to-peer payments app Tez in India, said the startup has identified an open space in the world of consumer finance.

"We think the general world of finance itself can be dramatically improved. With payments, we are seeing a sliver of that getting reinvented, but when you think about your money, the consumer experience there has a lot to be developed. It's a new space in consumer finance. We want to bring great consumer experiences with deep tech," he said.

"We are starting with the U.S. market, because the space we are going after is more open there," he said. "But we are building a global product. We will bring it to India fairly soon."

Shailendra Singh, managing director at Sequoia India, said Arbo Works has chosen a “massive unsolved problem in the global fintech space.”

He added, “Caesar and team are uniquely accomplished in having built multiple cutting-edge products that are used by billions of internet users on the planet. It's rare that a team with such achievements will join forces to startup. Similar to many other consumer fintech companies we have backed, this one also requires a more user-centric approach, a more delightful user experience and a more seamless and scalable platform than likely exists today. Team Sequoia India and I could not be more grateful to be a part of this journey and join forces with the dozens of ultra talented Arbonauts that are assembling to pursue a very inspiring mission.”

I asked Sengupta why he couldn't build what Arbo Works is attempting to create within Google.

"Large companies are a different kind of beast," he said. "We are product builders. I want to build products rather than deal with complex partner issues, external regulators, political issues. Google is such an iconic company now that it can't take one step without six people externally having six different opinions."

"We left [Google] on a very, very friendly note. Sundar is more than a mentor or boss … he is a brother to me and he is always going to stay that way. I owe so much of my life to him," he said. Has Pichai invested in Arbo Works? Sengupta declined to comment, but said many Google leaders have backed the startup.

Arbo Works is beginning to hire more people and is looking to recruit those who are focused on building a product with a long-term focus and share similar sensibilities. “We want people who want to work with amazing people and build something that when they’re 70 years old, they can look back and say they played a role in building it.”

SpaceX aims to conduct first orbital flight of Starship in January, Musk says

Posted: 17 Nov 2021 04:20 PM PST

SpaceX has been advancing the development of Starship, the largest ultra-super-heavy reusable launch system ever designed in history, at a jaw-dropping pace — and CEO Elon Musk is "comfortable" it will reach orbit sometime next year.

Musk made the comments — which often veered into the philosophical — at the National Academies' first virtual joint fall meeting of the Space Studies Board and the Board on Physics and Astronomy. The talk, titled simply "SpaceX Starship Discussion," and subsequent Q&A session gave Musk the opportunity to respond to questions from Academy members on the next-gen system's technical and operational details.

Musk is aiming for SpaceX to complete work on the launch pad and launch tower at Starbase, the company's sprawling facility in Boca Chica, Texas, later this month, with the first orbital launch set for January 2022. That would be followed by possibly a dozen additional launches, possibly more, throughout the rest of 2022, Musk said.

That doesn't mean Starship will reach orbit in January, however, as Musk was careful to note. "There's a lot of risk associated with this first launch," he said. "So I would not say that it is likely to be successful, but I think we will make a lot of progress."

The other major barrier to a January launch is regulatory approval. SpaceX's launch activities at Starbase are currently undergoing an environmental assessment with the Federal Aviation Administration. The FAA said earlier this week that it would wrap up that review by December 31, so if all goes according to Musk’s plans, a January launch is the earliest feasible date.

Musk also estimated it could start selling Starship launches at prices cheaper than the Falcon 9 in around two years, which are even earlier than the timeline part of SpaceX's proposal for NASA's Human Landing System. (SpaceX won the sole bid to develop the HLS, which will transport humans to the moon for the first time since the days of the Apollo program, for NASA's Artemis program. That launch, dubbed Artemis 3, is now scheduled to launch in 2025.)

Starship is moving fast

It's hard to overstate the scale of Starship, which includes the Starship spacecraft and the Super Heavy rocket, compared to all other launch systems in history. Fully assembled, it stands 394 feet tall (by comparison, NASA's in-development Space Launch System and Orion spacecraft is 322 feet fully stacked). Starship could have the capacity to repeatedly launch more than 100 tons into orbit and function as what Musk described as "a generalized transport mechanism for the greater solar system."

But Musk isn't aiming to build one, or two, or even 10 Starships; instead, he estimated during the talk that humanity may need around 1,000 launch systems to make life truly multiplanetary. And SpaceX has built a factory to mass manufacture them — or as close to mass manufacturing as you could get.

And the company has been moving fast on its development. Back in May, SpaceX flew the 15th prototype of Starship, and the launch vehicle reached around 30,000 feet with a successful upright landing. It was the first time a test concluded with the launch vehicle intact.

"The overarching goal of SpaceX has been to advance space technology such that humanity can become a multiplanet species and ultimately, a spacefaring civilization, and to make true the things that we read about in science fiction, and have them not always be fiction," he told National Academies’ members.

"I think this is very important for the long-term preservation of the light of consciousness."

Rewatch his talk here:
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