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Monday, 30 November 2020

Ankorstore raises $29.9 million for its wholesale marketplace

Ankorstore raises $29.9 million for its wholesale marketplace

French startup Ankorstore has raised a $29.9 million Series A round (€25 million) with Index Ventures leading the round. Existing investors GFC, Alven and Aglaé are also participating.

Ankorstore is building a wholesale marketplace that connects independent shop owners with brands selling household supplies, maple syrup, headbands, bath salts, stationery items and a lot more. That list alone should remind you of neighborhood stores that sell a ton of cutesy stuff that you don’t necessarily need but that tend to be popular.

The company works with 2,000 brands and 15,000 shops. And the startup isn’t just connecting buyers and sellers as it has a clear set of rules. For instance, the minimum first order is €100, which means that you can try out new products without ordering hundreds of items at once.

By default, Ankorstore withdraws the money 60 days after placing an order. Brands get paid upon delivery. And of course, buying from several brands through Ankorstore should simplify your admin tasks.

Ankorstore is currently live in eight countries — France, Spain, Austria, Germany, Belgium, Holland, Switzerland and Luxembourg. France is the biggest market followed by Germany. Up next, the startup plans to launch in the U.K. in 2021.

In many ways, Ankorstore reminds me of Faire, the wholesale marketplace that has raised hundreds of millions of dollars in the U.S.

“There are a number of different retail marketplaces connecting retailers with makers and brands. Where we believe we differ is in our clear focus on the independent shop owner, offering the tools and the terms that make it really easy and cost-effective to discover and access some of the most desirable up-and-coming brands,” Ankorstore co-founder Pierre-Louis Lacoste said.

Given that the startup is working with small suppliers, chances are they’re only selling their products in Europe. So there should be enough room for a European leader in that space that I would describe as wholesale Etsy-style marketplaces with a strong focus on curation.

Image Credits: Ankorstore



Singapore-based mental health app Intellect reaches one million users, closes seed funding

Singapore-based mental health app Intellect reaches one million users, closes seed funding

Theodoric Chew, co-founder and chief executive officer of mental health app Intellect

Theodoric Chew, co-founder and chief executive officer of mental health app Intellect

Intellect, a Singapore-based startup that wants to lower barriers to mental health care in Asia, says it has reached more than one million users just six months after launching. Google also announced today that the startup’s consumer app, also called Intellect, is one of its picks for best personal growth apps of 2020.

The company recently closed an undisclosed seed round led by Insignia Ventures Partners. Angel investors including e-commerce platform Carousell co-founder and chief executive officer Quek Siu Rui; former Sequoia partner Tim Lee; and startup consultancy xto10x’s Southeast Asia CEO J.J. Chai also participated.

In a statement, Insignia Ventures Partners principal Samir Chaibi said, “In Intellect, we see a fast-scaling platform addressing a pain that has become very obvious amidst the COVID-19 pandemic. We believe that pairing clinically-backed protocols with an efficient mobile-first delivery is the key to break down the barriers to access for millions of patients globally.”

Co-founder and chief executive officer Theodoric Chew launched Intellect earlier this year because while there is a growing pool of mental wellness apps in the United States and Europe that have attracted more funding during the COVID-19 pandemic, the space is still very young in Asia. Intellect’s goal is encourage more people to incorporate mental health care into their daily routines by lowering barriers like high costs and social stigma.

Singapore-based Intellect wants to lower barriers to mental health support in Asia

Intellect offers two products. One is a consumer app with self-guided programs based on cognitive behavioral therapy techniques that center on issues like anxiety, self-esteem or relationship issues.

The other is a mental health platform for employers to offer as a benefit and includes a recently launched telehealth service called Behavioural Health Coaching that connects users with mental health professionals. The service, which includes one-on-one video sessions and unlimited text messaging, is now a core part of Intellect’s services, Chew told TechCrunch.

Intellect’s enterprise product now reaches 10,000 employees, and its clients include tech companies, regional operations for multinational corporations and hospitals. Most are located in Singapore, Hong Kong, Indonesia and India, and range in size from 100 to more than 3,000 employees.

For many small- to mid-sized employers, Intellect is often the first mental health benefit they have offered. Larger clients may already have EAP (employee assistance programs), but Chew said those are often underutilized, with an average adoption rate of 1% to 2%. On the other hand, he said Intellect’s employee benefit program sees an average adoption rate of 30% in the first month after it is rolled out at a company.

Chew added that the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted more companies to address burnout and other mental health issues.

“In terms of larger trends, we’ve seen a huge spike in companies across the region having mental health and wellbeing of their employees being prioritized on their agenda,” said Chew. “In terms of user trends, we see a significantly higher utilization in work stress and burnout, anxiety and relationship-related programs.”

Intellect’s seed round will be used to expand in Asian markets and to help fund clinical research studies it is currently conducting with universities and organizations in Singapore, Australia and the United Kingdom.

Mental health startups are raising spirits and venture capital



China’s tech firms rush to deliver solutions for grocery shopping

China’s tech firms rush to deliver solutions for grocery shopping

Nearly all of China’s largest internet firms have established a presence in online grocery. Just this week, news arrived that Alibaba co-led the $196 million C3 funding round of Nice Tuan, the two-year-old grocery group-buying firm’s fourth round year to date.

People in China shop online for almost everything, including groceries. At first, grocery e-commerce appears to have caught on mainly among the digitally-savvy who have grown reliant on the convenience of e-commerce and don’t mind paying a bit more for delivery. Many elderly shoppers, on the other hand, still prefer visiting traditional wet markets where ingredients are generally cheaper.

Now tech companies in China are scrambling to capture grocery shoppers of all ages. A new business model that’s getting a lot of funding is that of Nice Tuan, the so-called community group buying.

In conventional grocery e-commerce, an intermediary platform like Alibaba normally connects individual shoppers to an array of merchants and offers doorstep delivery, which arrives normally within an hour in China.

A community group-buying, in comparison, relies on an army of neighborhood-based managers — often housewives looking for part-time work — to promote products amongst neighbors and tally their orders in group chats, normally through the popular WeChat messenger. The managers then place the group orders with suppliers and have the items delivered to pick-up spots in the community, such as a local convenience store.

It’s not uncommon to see piles of grocery bags at corner stores wating to be fetched these days, and the model has inspired overseas Chinese entrepreneurs to follow suit in America.

What grocery startup Weee! learned from China’s tech giants

Even in China where e-commerce is ubiquitous, the majority of grocery shopping still happens offline. That’s changing quickly. The fledgling area of grocery group-buying is growing at over 100% year-over-year in 2020 and expected to reach 72 billion yuan ($11 billion) in market size, according to research firm iiMedia.

It sounds as if grocery group-buying and self-pickup is a step back in a world where doorstep convenience is the norm. But the model has its appeal. Texting orders in a group chat is in a way more accessible for the elderly, who may find Chinese e-commerce apps, often overlaid with busy buttons and tricky sales rules, unfriendly. With bulk orders, sales managers might get better bargains from suppliers. If a group-buying company is ambitious, it can always add last-mile delivery to its offering.

Chinese tech giants are clearly bullish about online grocery and diversifying their portfolios to make sure they have a skin in the game. Tencent is an investor in Xingsheng Youxuan, Nice Tuan’s major competitor. Food delivery service Meituan has its own grocery arm, offering both the traditional digital grocer as well as the WeChat-based group-buy model. E-commerce upstart Pinduoduo similarly supports grocery group purchases. Alibaba itself already operates the Hema supermarket, which operates both online and offline markets.



AWS brings the Mac mini to its cloud

AWS today opened its re:Invent conference with a surprise announcement: the company is bringing the Mac mini to its cloud. These new EC2 Mac instances, as AWS calls them, are now available in preview. They won’t come cheap, though.

The target audience here — and the only one AWS is targeting for now — is developers who want cloud-based build and testing environments for their Mac and iOS apps. But it’s worth noting that with remote access, you get a fully-featured Mac mini in the cloud, and I’m sure developers will find all kinds of other use cases for this as well.

Given the recent launch of the M1 Mac minis, it’s worth pointing out that the hardware AWS is using — at least for the time being — are i7 machines with six physical and 12 logical cores and 32 GB of memory. Using the Mac’s built-in networking options, AWS connects them to its Nitro System for fast network and storage access. This means you’ll also be able to attach AWS block storage to these instances, for example.

Unsurprisingly, the AWS team is also working on bringing Apple’s new M1 Mac minis into its data centers. The current plan is to roll this out “early next year,” AWS tells me, and definitely within the first half of 2021. Both AWS and Apple believe that the need for Intel-powered machines won’t go away anytime soon, though, especially given that a lot of developers will want to continue to run their tests on Intel machines for the foreseeable future.

The new Mac mini: The revival of the no-compromise, low-cost Mac

David Brown, AWS’s vice president of EC2, tells me that these are completely unmodified Mac minis. AWS only turned off Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It helps, Brown said, that the minis fit nicely into a 1U rack.

“You can’t really stack them on shelves — you want to put them in some sort of service sled [and] it fits very well into a service sled and then our cards and all the various things we have to worry about, from an integration point of view, fit around it and just plug into the Mac mini through the ports that it provides,” Brown explained. He admitted that this was obviously a new challenge for AWS. The only way to offer this kind of service is to use Apple’s hardware, after all.

Image Credits: AWS

It’s also worth noting that AWS is not virtualizing the hardware. What you’re getting here is full access to your own device that you’re not sharing with anybody else. “We wanted to make sure that we support the Mac Mini that you would get if you went to the Apple store and you bought a Mac mini,” Brown said.

Unlike with other EC2 instances, whenever you spin up a new Mac instance, you have to pre-pay for the first 24 hours to get started. After those first 24 hours, prices are by the second, just like with any other instance type AWS offers today.

AWS will charge $1.083 per hour, billed by the second. That’s just under $26 to spin up a machine and run it for 24 hours. That’s quite a lot more than what some of the small Mac mini cloud providers are charging (we’re generally talking about $60 or less per month for their entry-level offerings and around two to three times as much for a comparable i7 machine with 32GB of RAM).

Image Credits: Ron Miller/TechCrunch

Until now, Mac mini hosting was a small niche in the hosting market, though it has its fair number of players, with the likes of MacStadium, MacinCloud, MacWeb and Mac Mini Vault vying for their share of the market.

With this new offering from AWS, they are now facing a formidable competitor, though they can still compete on price. AWS, however, argues that it can give developers access to all of the additional cloud services in its portfolio, which sets it apart from all of the smaller players.

“The speed that things happen at [other Mac mini cloud providers] and the granularity that you can use those services at is not as fine as you get with a large cloud provider like AWS,” Brown said. “So if you want to launch a machine, it takes a few days to provision and somebody puts a machine in a rack for you and gives you an IP address to get to it and you manage the OS. And normally, you’re paying for at least a month — or a longer period of time to get a discount. What we’ve done is you can literally launch these machines in minutes and have a working machine available to you. If you decide you want 100 of them, 500 of them, you just ask us for that and we’ll make them available. The other thing is the ecosystem. All those other 200-plus AWS services that you’re now able to utilize together with the Mac mini is the other big difference.”

Brown also stressed that Amazon makes it easy for developers to use different machine images, with the company currently offering images for macOS Mojave and Catalina, with Big Sure support coming “at some point in the future.” And developers can obviously create their own images with all of the software they need so they can reuse them whenever they spin up a new machine.

“Pretty much every one of our customers today has some need to support an Apple product and the Apple ecosystem, whether it’s iPhone, iPad or  Apple TV, whatever it might be. They’re looking for that bold use case,” Brown said. “And so the problem we’ve really been focused on solving is customers that say, ‘hey, I’ve moved all my server-side workloads to AWS, I’d love to be able to move some of these build workflows, because I still have some Mac minis in a data center or in my office that I have to maintain. I’d love that just to be on AWS.’ ”

AWS’s marquee launch customers for the new service are Intuit, Ring and mobile camera app FiLMiC.

“EC2 Mac instances, with their familiar EC2 interfaces and APIs, have enabled us to seamlessly migrate our existing iOS and macOS build-and-test pipelines to AWS, further improving developer productivity,” said Pratik Wadher, vice president of Product Development at Intuit. “We‘re experiencing up to 30% better performance over our data center infrastructure, thanks to elastic capacity expansion, and a high availability setup leveraging multiple zones. We’re now running around 80% of our production builds on EC2 Mac instances, and are excited to see what the future holds for AWS innovation in this space.”

The new Mac instances are now available in a number of AWS regions. These include US East (N. Virginia), US East (Ohio), US West (Oregon), Europe (Ireland) and Asia Pacific (Singapore), with other regions to follow soon.



Cyber Monday scams? Fakespot says it can identify fraudulent reviews and sellers online

Cyber Monday scams? Fakespot says it can identify fraudulent reviews and sellers online

The pandemic has made it all but impossible for a retail company without an online presence to survive. Yet while companies heavily dependent on foot traffic like J.Crew and Sur la Table have filed for bankruptcy this year, companies that are expert in e-commerce have thrived, including Target and Walmart. Amazon alone now attracts roughly one quarter of all dollars spent online by U.S. shoppers.

Unfortunately, as more shopping moves online, fraud is exploding, too. The problem is such that startups working with enterprises — flagging transactions for banks, for example — are raising buckets of funding. Meanwhile, one New York-based startup, Fakespot, is taking a different approach. It’s using AI to notify online shoppers when the products they’re looking to buy are fake listings or when reviews they’re reading on marketplaces like Amazon or eBay are a fiction.

We talked earlier today with Kuwaiti immigrant Saoud Khalifah about the four-year-old business, which got started in his dorm room after his own frustrating experience in trying to buy nutritional supplements from Amazon. After he’d nabbed his master’s degree in software engineering, he launched the company in earnest.

Like many other companies, Fakespot was originally focused on helping enterprise customers identify counterfeit outfits and fake reviews. When the pandemic struck, company spied an “opening crack on the internet,” as Khalifah describes it, and began instead catering directly to consumers who are increasingly using platforms that are struggling to keep up — and whose solutions are often more focused on protecting sellers from buyers and not the other way around.

The pivot seems to be working. Fakespot just closed on $4 million in Series A funding led by Bullpen Capital, which was joined by SRI Capital, Faith Capital and 500 Startups among others in a round that brings the company’s total funding to $7 million.

The company is gaining more attention from shoppers, too. Khalifah says that a Chrome browser extension introduced earlier this year has now been downloaded 300,000 times — and this on the heels of “millions of users” who have separately visited Fakespot’s site, typed in a URL of a product review, and through its “Fakespot analyzer,” been provided with free data to help inform their buying decisions.

Indeed, according to Khalifah, since Fakespot’s official founding it has amassed a database of more than 8 billion reviews — around 10 times as many as the popular travel site Tripadvisor — from which its AI has learned. He says the tech is sophisticated enough at this point to identify AI-generated text; as for the “lowest-hanging fruit,” he says it can easily spot when reviews or positive sentiments about a company are posted in an inorganic way, presumably published by click farms. (It also tracks fake upvotes.)

As for where shoppers can use the chrome extension, Fakespot currently scours all the largest marketplaces, including Amazon, eBay, Best Buy, Walmart, and Sephora. Soon, says Khalifah, users will also be able to use the technology to assess the quality of products being sold through Shopify, the software platform that is home to hundreds of thousands of online stores. (Last year, it surpassed eBay to become the No. 2 e-commerce destination in the U.S., according to Shopify.)

Right now, Fakespot is free to use, including because every review a consumer enters into its database helps train its AI further. Down the road, the company expects to make money by adding a suite of tools atop its free offering. It may also strike lead-generation deals with companies whose products and reviews it has already verified as real and truthful.

The question, of course, is how reliably the technology works in the meantime. While Khalifah understandably sings Fakespot’s praises, a visit to the Google Play store, for example, paints a mixed picture, with many enthusiastic reviews and some that are, well, less enthusiastic.

Khalifah readily concedes that Fakespot’s mobile apps need more attention, which he says they will receive. Though Fakespot has been focused predominately on the desktop experience, Khalifah notes that more than half of online shopping is expected to be conducted over mobile phones by some time next year, a shift that isn’t lost on him, even while it hinges a bit on the pandemic being brought effectively to an end (and consumers finding themselves on the run again).

Still, he says that “ironically, a lot of [bad] reviews are from sellers who are angry that we’ve given them F grades. They’re often mad that we revealed that their product is filled with fake reviews.”

As for how Fakespot moves past these to improve its own rating, Khalifah suggests that the best strategy is actually pretty simple.

“We hope we’ll have many more satisfied users,” he says, adding: “No one else really has consumers’ backs.”



Salut raises $1.25M for its virtual fitness service

Salut raises $1.25M for its virtual fitness service

This morning Salut, an app-based service that allows fitness trainers to host classes virtually, announced that it has raised $1.25 million in a new financing event. The round was led by Charles Hudson, an investor at Precursor Ventures.

Founder Matthew DiPietro, formerly of Twitch, told TechCrunch that Salut soft-launched in mid-September, with a wider release coming today.

DiPietro thought up the concept behind Salut before the pandemic hit, he said during an interview, but after COVID-19 appeared the idea took on new urgency. The company put together what DiPietro described as a no-code alpha version of the service in May to test the market, allowing the then-nascent startup to validate demand on both sides of its marketplace — it’s famously difficult to jumpstart two-sided marketplaces, as demand tends to follow supply, and vice-versa.

The test allowed the company to get to confidence on demand existing from both trainers and exercise fans, and in its initial economic model.

With the new round in the bank and its product now formally launched, it’s up to Salut to scale rapidly. The company currently has 55 registered trainers on its platform, a reasonable start for the seed-stage startup. It will need to grow that figure by a few orders of magnitude if it wants to generate enough revenue to reach an eventual Series A.

But Salut is not focused on early-revenue generation, taking no cut of trainer revenue today. Indeed, per an email the company sent out to its users this morning, the startup is passing along 100% of post-Apple income that trainers generate, or 85% of the gross.

Currently users can donate to, or tip, trainers that host classes. DiPietro told TechCrunch that subscription options are coming in a quarter or two. The startup also announced today that trainers can now allow their classes to be replayed, what the startup called one of its “most requested features.”

Anyone familiar with Peloton understands why this matters; only a fraction of classes on the Peloton ecosystem are live at any point in time, but the bike comes with a library of content that users can simply load up whenever they like. This also allows Peloton to release more niche content than it otherwise might, as even the heavy metal-themed rides can accrete a reasonable ridership over time (something they might not be able to manage if all classes on the platform were only live once and then gone forever).

DiPietro is bullish on building income streams for trainers, especially during a pandemic that has locked many gyms, leaving fitness processionals with little to no income in many cases.

There’s some early signal that users are willing to pay, the company said, with early users willing to pay $5 or $10 for an hour of fitness training. And with a focus on the long-tail of trainers who can’t attract 10,000 fans to a single class, Salut thinks there are a large number of trainers who have enough pull to generate more income from its service, in time, than they could at a traditional studio.

Salut supports group video classes, of course, so trainers can collect monies from cohorts of users at a time.

The company’s fundraising is largely earmarked for engineering, with the company having what its founder called an ambitious product roadmap.

The startup also announced a new project with Fitness Mentors, a company that helps trainers get certified, to create what the two companies are calling “the industry’s first Virtual Group Fitness Instructor (V-GFI) course and certification.”

You can see why Salut would want the certification to exist; its existence will allow users of its service to find trainers that are worth their time on its service, and may raise the overall level of quality of classes provided.

Let’s see how far Salut can get with $1.25 million.

Gift Guide: Smart exercise gear to hunker down and get fit with



Curio Wellness launches $30M fund to help women and minorities own a cannabis dispensary

Curio Wellness launches $30M fund to help women and minorities own a cannabis dispensary

“We think of diversity as a keystone issue for the cannabis industry,” said Curio WMBE Fund managing director Jerel Registre in a conversation with TechCrunch. Registre’s conviction around this program is obvious as he explains the problem the fund is addressing.

The new fund, started by the Maryland-based medical cannabis company Curio Wellness, aims to help underserved entrepreneurs entering the cannabis market. With $30 million to invest, the Curio WMBE Fund is looking to invest in up to 50 women, minority and disabled veterans seeking to open and operate a Curio Wellness franchise with a path to 100% ownership in three years.

Registre tells TechCrunch the goal is to create more diverse ownership through a proven business model. Participants of this program gain access to capital and operational resources.

Curio made a name for itself in Maryland, where it’s the largest cannabis cultivator by market share. Founded in 2014, the family-owned business operates dispensaries rooted in a patient-centric approach. While a legally separate but affiliated entity from Curio Wellness, the Curio WMBE Fund aims to give franchisees access to Curio’s secret sauce.

“In looking at the systemic barriers that women, minorities and disabled veterans face in accessing capital, we decided to develop a solution that directly addresses this massive economic disparity,” said Michael Bronfein, CEO of Curio Wellness. “The Fund provides qualifying entrepreneurs with the investment capital they need to become a Curio Wellness Center franchisee while ensuring their success through our best in class business operations.”

“Let’s bottle the success we have,” Registre added. He likens the franchise model to McDonald’s, where the national corporation gives operators a proven standard operating procedure and ongoing support.

“Our fund is unlike any other in the industry,” Registre said, “as eligible entrepreneurs will have a clear path to 100% ownership in as little as three years. Many other funds rely on a model that utilizes minority entrepreneurs as a vehicle to achieve licenses: The Curio approach flips this model by empowering diverse entrepreneurs and supporting them along the way. If something happens and an investment-funded franchisee defaults, they must be replaced by another minority or woman owner. This ensures these licensees can get the financial support they need to launch while ensuring that the fund’s ultimate mission of supporting diverse entrepreneurs is achieved.”

Registre explained that diversity is central to Curio Wellness, too. Of the company’s 200 employees, 40% are female, and more than half are minorities. At the leadership level, 38% of management is female, and 44% identify as a member of a minority community.

“Diversity is a core asset that we recognize as integral to our success and our future, and that is why we decided to create this investment fund,” Registre said.

The fund provides two phases of support. The first provides capital to franchisees to open their Curio Wellness Center and assist them in obtaining licenses, selecting a location and hiring and training employees. Once the location is operational, the fund intends to provide ongoing support around managing, sales and marketing, store operations, and ensuring employees stay updated on product information.

Curio sees its locations as more than cannabis dispensaries. The company calls them Wellness Centers.

“Curio locations go beyond the traditional experience people have at a medical cannabis dispensary — they are total wellness destinations, under the leadership of a licensed pharmacist,” Registre explains. “Patient wellness is at the center of everything we do and is exemplified by a diverse array of holistic health products, services and educational programming we offer. While additive to the medical cannabis patient experience, these features open the store up to the entire community, not limiting the healthcare experience to only those with a medical cannabis card. This practice, of a patient-first mindset through a pharmacist-led model, allows us to truly lead the pursuit of wellness for everyone who walks in the front door.”

As of writing, the fund has raised half of its $30 million target. The company says the fund intentionally targeted, pitched and secured an investment pool that includes women and minorities. The fund expects to close by the end of 2020, and applications are expected to open in early 2021.

Weed stocks are hitting new highs after Biden win

Cannabis legalization measures set to pass in 5 states

Meadow launches a powerful mobile marketing tool for cannabis dispensaries



The Station: COVID’s effect on car ownership

The Station: COVID’s effect on car ownership

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox.

Hello and welcome back to The Station, a newsletter dedicated to all the present and future ways people and packages move from Point A to Point B.

For all my American readers, I hope you’re happy and satiated from the Thanksgiving holiday in this oddest of years. My hope for all Station readers, no matter where you reside, is a safe and healthy remainder of the year (and beyond!). While I took some time off last week, the news wheel kept on turning. A few of items got my attention last week, notably an EY study that examined how views on public transit, mobility as a service and car ownership are changing due to COVID-19. Let’s get reading!

Email me anytime at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Micromobbin’

the station scooter1a

Lime is adding another 1,000 scooters in San Francisco, an action it is able to take because the company also holds Jump’s permit in the city. For those who might have forgotten, Lime now owns Jump through a complex deal with Uber.

The company also released San Francisco scooter ridership data that shows how trip start and ends have moved outside of the downtown core and into neighborhoods like the Mission, Castro and Hayes Valley. Lime said this changing ridership pattern is consistent with its findings across the country, with more trips moving to residential neighborhoods since the COVID-19 pandemic swept across the globe.

In other news …

CAKE, the Swedish maker of lightweight electric motorcycles, and the European battery supplier Northvolt have partnered to develop new battery cells for CAKE’s range of electric motorcycles. Research, development, and testing will take place in 2021 with product slated to grace 2022 models.

Deal of the week

money the station

Another day, another SPAC. Anyone else looking forward to a good old fashioned S-1 filing?

Metromile, the pay-per-mile auto insurer, is credited for disrupting some of the inefficiencies of the auto insurance business model, notably how consumers are charged. Instead of a standard flat fee, the company charges customers based on their mileage, which it is able to measure via a device plugged into the vehicle.

That sounds like the kind of business model that might see an uptick in new customers during COVID pandemic times. And that did eventually happen. However, during the space between existing customers reducing their driving time and new drivers signing up with Metromile, the company was forced to lay off about one-third of its workforce.

The company has since recovered and now it’s taking the SPAC path to the public markets. Metromile plans to merge with special purpose acquisition company INSU Acquisition Corp. II, with an equity valuation of $1.3 billion. The company raised $160 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, in an investment round led by Chamath Palihapitiya’s firm Social Capital.

Metromile plans to use those proceeds to reduce existing debt and accelerate growth, specifically to hire employees to support its consumer insurance and enterprise businesses, and grow beyond its eight-state geographic footprint to a goal of 21 states by the end of next year and nationwide coverage by the end of 2022.

For details on the Metromile SPAC head on over to my story. For a deeper dive into the insurance tech business, check out Alex Wilhelm’s article.

Another giant deal 

Manbang — described as the Chinese Uber for trucks — was formed in 2017 through a merger between rivals Yunmanman and Huochebang. The company’s app matches truck drivers and merchants transporting cargo and provides financial services to truckers.

Apparently, investors can’t get enough of these kinds of freight app businesses. Manbang is the latest example with a $1.7 billion haul from Softbank Vision Fund, Sequoia Capital China, Permira and Fidelity, a consortium that co-led the round. Other participants were Hillhouse Capital, GGV Capital, Lightspeed China Partners, Tencent, Jack Ma’s YF Capital and more.

This is just two years after the company raised $1.9 billion. Manbang said it achieved profitability this year. Its valuation was reportedly on course to reach $10 billion in 2018.

It’s raining dollars!

 Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images

For Tesla, that is.

I’m sure you’re all aware, but in case you missed it, Tesla’s market cap surpassed $500 billion last week. As of today (Monday), it sits at $547 billion — a more than fivefold increase since the start of the year.

It’s likely that price will push higher thanks to its imminent inclusion on the S&P 500 Index. When Tesla joins the S&P 500 on December 21, it will be among the most valuable companies on the benchmark. Its weighting will be so influential that the S&P DJI is mulling whether to add the stock at the full float-adjusted market capitalization weight all at once or in two tranches.

Tesla’s addition to the S&P 500 isn’t just a symbolic nod. Joining the S&P 500 has real financial benefits, as investors that have index-tracked funds will be forced to buy shares. With share prices already popping, that will mean investors will have to sell other stocks to make room for Tesla.

The rise of the car

It’s nearing December, which means I’ve been — and will continue to be — flooded with year-end surveys, studies and forecasts for 2021.

One study from EY, which examined data from nine countries, suggests that mobility as a service (MaaS) is losing momentum to the car, truck and SUV.

And millennials are driving the trend. The 2020 EY Mobility Consumer Index, which surveyed more than 3,300 consumers across nine countries, found that 31% of people without a car intend to buy one in the next six months with 45% of those will be millennials. The study also found that just 6% of non-car owners surveyed are looking to buy an all-electric vehicle.

More than three-quarters (78%) of respondents said they’re going to be more likely to use their cars for travel in a post-pandemic world with millennials making more than half of that number (52%), according to EY.

This isn’t just a U.S. phenomenon. Respondents from Italy (47%) and Germany (46%) said they’re more likely to purchase a new car. Respondents from China were most likely to increase their car usage (90% of respondents), closely followed by India (85%) and Germany (81%).

Meanwhile, public transport use is expected to decline by around 30%.

John Simlett, EY Global Future of Mobility Leader, raises several questions in the study.

“With more people buying cars and car usage expected to increase, this leaves policymakers with some very difficult questions to answer: How to accommodate all these cars on our roads aim for a more diverse mobility mix? How will this trend impact public transport investment? Quite simply, is this sustainable, and if not, what needs to be done and by whom?”

Readers: what are your answers? Send them my way.

Notable reads and other tidbits

the-station-delivery

And finally, the news smorgasbord you’ve been waiting for.

Ford’s all-electric Mustang Mach-E has an estimated EPA range of between 211 miles to 300 miles, depending on the model. While the Mach-E matched Ford’s range target, it’s well under that found in competing vehicles.

Gatik, the autonomous vehicle startup focused on the “middle mile,” is expanding into Canada through a partnership with retail giant Loblaw. The company, which also announced $25 million in fresh funding, already uses its self-driving box trucks to deliver customer online grocery orders for Walmart.

Gatik is deploying five autonomous box trucks in Toronto to deliver goods for Loblaw starting in January 2021. The fleet will be used seven days a week on five routes along public roads. All vehicles will have a safety driver as a co-pilot. This deployment, which follows a 10-month pilot in the Toronto area, marks the first autonomous delivery fleet in Canada.

General Motors changed sides in a battle over whether states — and specifically California — can set tailpipe emissions regulations and other rules meant to mitigate climate change that are stricter than the federal government. The automaker said it will no longer back the Trump administration’s lawsuit to prevent California from setting its own rules.

May Mobility, the autonomous shuttle startup backed by Toyota, has a new partnership with on-demand shuttle platform Via. (I missed this item in the last newsletter). The aim is for the companies to combine their expertise to expand services to new cities in 2021. May Mobility will use Via’s fleet platform for booking, routing, passenger and vehicle assignment and identification, customer experience, and fleet management of its autonomous vehicles.

Ola, Uber and other ride-hailing firms in India will be only able draw a fee of up to 20% on ride fares. The new rules are  a setback for the SoftBank-backed firms, which are already struggling to improve their finances in the key overseas market.

The guidelines, which for the first time bring modern-age app-based ride-hailing firms under a regulatory framework in the country, also put a cap on the so-called surge pricing, the fare Uber and Ola charge during hours when their services see peak demands, TechCrunch’s Manish Singh reports.



2-year-old CRED valued at $800 million after $80 million funding round

2-year-old CRED valued at $800 million after $80 million funding round

CRED, a two-year-old startup that is helping credit card users in India improve their financial behaviour, has raised $80 million in a new financing round, a source familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The new financing round, a Series C for CRED, was led by existing investor DST Global. Much of the round — in fact, if not all — has been financed by existing investors, including Sequoia Capital and Ribbit Capital, that are doubling down on Kunal Shah’s startup, the source said on condition of anonymity as they are not authorized to speak to the media.

The new round gives CRED a post-money valuation of about $800 million, the source said. That’s up from about $450 million valuation that CRED attained after its $120 million Series B round last year.

A CRED spokesperson declined to comment.

On CRED, customers are offered a range of features, including the ability to better track their spending across various credit cards, and get reminders. Moreover, CRED incentivizes customers to pay their bill on time by rewarding them points, which they can use to subscribe to a range of premium services and get a discount on purchase of high-quality products.

The platform is not available to all credit card holders in India. The startup requires a customer to have a certain credit score — about 750 — to be able to sign up for the service. This way, CRED has built a customer base that comprises some of the most sought-after people in India.

In recent quarters, CRED has introduced a number of additional services, including allowing customers to pay their rent using their credit card, and bulked up its e-commerce store. What other ways Shah, who previously ran mobile wallet service Freecharge and is celebrated for delivering one of the few successful exits in the nation’s 15-year-old startup ecosystem, wants to serve these customers remains a big question.

“CRED has the richest Indians as customers already,” wrote Anmol Maini, a San Francisco-based engineer, who closely tracks the Indian startup ecosystem. “Kunal Shah has the luxury of time for building CRED into the company he envisions it to be. He has that luxury because he has access to capital and talent, knows how to build and scale companies and he definitely knows how to generate returns for his investors.”

The new funds come at a time when CRED is enjoying a surge in its growth. The startup, which was one of the sponsors of the recently concluded IPL cricket tournament, ran a number of clever and fun advertisements during the tournament featuring Indian legends. And those ads worked.



Dozens of tech companies sign ‘Tech for Good Call’ following French initiative

Dozens of tech companies sign ‘Tech for Good Call’ following French initiative

A couple of years ago, French President Emmanuel Macron initiated the Tech for Good Summit by inviting 50 tech CEOs to discuss the challenges in the tech industry and make some announcements.

Usually, tech CEOs meet ahead of Viva Technology, a tech event in Paris. This year, Viva Technology had to be canceled, which means that tech CEOs couldn’t get together, take a group photo and say that they want to make the world a better place.

In the meantime, dozens of tech CEOs have chosen to sign a common pledge. Despite the positive impact of some technological breakthroughs, they collectively recognize that everything is not perfect with the tech industry.

“Recognizing that such progress may be hindered by negative externalities, including unfair competition such as abuse of dominant or systemic position, and fragmentation of the internet; that, without appropriate safeguards, technology can also be used to threaten fundamental freedoms and human rights or weaken democracy; that, unless we implement appropriate measures to combat it, some individuals and organizations inevitably use it for criminal purposes, including in the context of conflicts,” the pledge says.

Among other things, companies that sign the pledge agree to cooperate when it comes to fighting toxic content, such as child sexual abuse material and terrorist content. They promise to “responsibly address hate speech, disinformation and opinion manipulation.”

Interestingly, they also agree that they should “contribute fairly to the taxes in countries where [they] operate.” This has been an ongoing issue between the French government and the U.S. government. The OECD and the European Union have also discussed implementing a tax on tech giants so that they report to tax authorities in each country where they operate.

France starts collecting tax on tech giants

Other commitments mention privacy, social inclusiveness, diversity and equity, fighting all sorts of discriminations and more. As the name suggests, the pledge revolves around using technology for good things.

Now let’s talk about who signed the pledge. There are some well-known names, such as Sundar Pichai from Alphabet (Google), Mark Zuckerberg from Facebook, Brad Smith from Microsoft, Evan Spiegel from Snap and Jack Dorsey, the CEO of Twitter and Square. Other companies include Cisco, Deliveroo, Doctolib, IBM, OpenClassrooms, Uber, etc.

Some nonprofit organizations also signed the pledge, such as the Mozilla Foundation, Simplon, Tech for Good France, etc.

But it’s more interesting to see who’s not on the list. Amazon and Apple have chosen not to sign the pledge. There have been discussions with Apple but the company eventually chose not to participate.

“Amazon didn’t want to sign it and I invite you to ask them directly,” a source close to the French president said. The French government is clearly finger-pointing in Amazon’s case.

This is an odd move as it’s a non-binding pledge. You can say that you want to “contribute fairly to taxes” and then argue that you’re paying everything that you owe — tax optimization is not tax evasion, after all. Worse, you can say that you’re building products with “privacy by design” in mind while you’re actually building entire companies based on personalized ads and micro-targeting.

In other words, the Tech for Good summit was created for photo opportunities (like this photo from 2018 below). Tech CEOs want to be treated like heads of state, while Macron wants to position himself as a tech-savvy president. It’s a win-win for them, and a waste of time for everyone else.

Some nonprofit organizations and governance groups are actually working hard to build digital commons. But big tech companies are using the same lexicon with these greenwashing-style campaigns.

In 2018, hundreds of organizations signed the Paris Call. In 2019, the biggest social media companies signed the Christchurch Call. And now, we have the Tech for Good Call. Those calls can’t replace proper regulation.

Image Credits: Charles Platiau / AFP / Getty Images



The road to smart city infrastructure starts with research

The road to smart city infrastructure starts with research

Dominik Schiener Contributor
Dominik Schiener is co-Founder and Chairman of the IOTA Foundation. He has been in the blockchain space since 2011, with several startups in Switzerland, UK and Germany. His primary focus is how to improve physical infrastructure with digital infrastructure such as DLT and AI.
Mathew Yarger Contributor
Mathew is Head of Mobility and Automotive at the IOTA Foundation, where he develops strategy and solutions around the use of data with distributed ledger technology-based innovations. These solutions focus on enabling flexible and privacy-centric data and value transfer within the public sector for use in smart cities, critical infrastructure, environmental and energy systems, and mobility-focused data industries.

In the United States, critical city, state and federal infrastructure is falling behind. While heavy investment, planning and development have gone into the U.S. infrastructure system, much of it is not keeping up with the pace of new technology, and some of it hasn’t had a proper update in decades, instead just adding new systems onto old systems. This can be allotted to a combination of liability structures in the U.S., difficulty in enabling interconnection between infrastructure in different jurisdictions, worry over introducing large-scale security risks and an attempt to mitigate that risk.

There is interest in upgrading city systems to be more efficient, to be more in line with real-time demand and to move into the 21st century, but it’s going to take work. It’s also going to take new technology.

Distributed ledger technology (DLT), when applied correctly, can do for a city’s infrastructure what existing technologies cannot. Where existing technologies are heavy, requiring expensive servers and a larger energy draw, distributed ledger technology is light and can be implemented on individual nodes (code environments) and directly onto things like traffic light sensors. It also allows for more oversight from a privacy perspective. The ability to bring distributed ledger technology into lightweight frameworks allows for more security and upgrades to critical infrastructure.

Benefits of smart infrastructure

The biggest impact of smart infrastructure is that it enables local governments to focus on the reason they’re there in the first place; to increase the quality of life of the local residents, bring stability and culture to local businesses, and create a welcoming and frictionless environment for tourists or visitors. Governments can create stability, streamline sources of revenue, and integrate a frictionless operational environment for people and organizations in their jurisdiction.

Consider transportation infrastructure. A lot of revenue in cities and states comes from things like tolls and roadside parking, and of course taxes. States control the highways, interstates, and tolling infrastructure commonly through collaboration with service providers. Cities control the local roadside and passthrough streets and the revenue accrued through parking solutions. With the pandemic, these resources have dried up due to people staying at home, social distancing, using less public transit and working remotely.

This now offers an opportunity for an expanded example of the desire to understand the transportation flow. If cities had more real time insights into this, they’d be able to understand the demand and have a more fluidly flowing traffic condition. This can be done through new technologies such as what are seen deployed in Singapore like green link determinings systems, parking guidance systems, and expressway monitoring systems allowing for enhanced traffic awareness and guidance.

There are also keen ways to incentivize traffic guidance while bringing stability to local small and medium businesses throughout cities such as using parking guidance systems to enable local businesses to offer discounts for parking nearby.

An open transportation grid (in the sense of data points gathered for streamlining and managing) can create smoother traffic patterns in cities with smaller road grids. Transportation centers could communicate with delivery services, understanding their routes and setting up parking reservation windows. Traffic flow could be managed so that delivery services are able to get in and out without causing back-ups on tight, busy roads.

Another offering of smart infrastructure can be seen with cross border connections for transportation of goods and services. The ownership of infrastructure in the U.S. is highly fragmented; with cities owning local and neighborhood roadsides, and states owning highways and interstates. This also means that the infrastructure supporting this is highly distributed, because each entity has to have it’s own systems in place to support their infrastructure, typically using different solutions, services and data structures.



Alphabet’s DeepMind achieves historic new milestone in AI-based protein structure prediction

Alphabet’s DeepMind achieves historic new milestone in AI-based protein structure prediction

DeepMind, the AI technology company that’s part of Google parent Alphabet, has achieved a significant breakthrough in AI-based protein structure prediction. The company announced today that its AlphaFold system has officially solved a protein folding grand challenge that has flummoxed the scientific community for 50 years. The advance inn DeepMind’s AlphaFold capabilities could lead to a significant leap forward in areas like our understanding of disease, as well as future drug discovery and development.

The test that AlphaFold passed essentially shows that the AI can correctly figure out, to a very high degree of accuracy (accurate to within the width of an atom, in fact), the structure of proteins in just days – a very complex task that is crucial to figuring out how diseases can be best treated, as well as solving other big problems like working out how best to break down ecologically dangerous material like toxic waste. You may have heard of ‘Folding@Home,’ the program that allows people to contribute their own home computing (and formerly, game console) processing power to protein folding experiments. That massive global crowdsourcing effort was necessary because using traditional methods, portion folding prediction takes years and is extremely expensive in terms of straight cost, and computing resources.

DeepMind’s approach involves using an “Attentionb-basd neural network system” (basically a neural network that can focus on specific inputs in order to increase efficiency). It’s able to continually refine its own predictive graph of possible protein folding outcomes based on their folding history, and provide highly accurate predictions as a result.

How proteins fold – or go from being a random string of amino acids when originally created, to a complex 3D structure in their final stable form – is key to understanding how diseases are transmitted, as well as how common conditions like allergies work. If you understand the folding process, you can potentially alter it, halting an infection’s progress mid-stride, or conversely, correct mistakes in folding that can lead to neurodegenerative and cognitive disorders.

DeepMind’s technological leap could make accurately predicting these folds a much less time- and resource-consuming process, which could dramatically change the pace at which our understanding of diseases and therapeutics progresses. This could come in handy to address major global threats including future potential pandemics like the COVID-19 crisis we’re currently enduring, by predicting viral protein structures to a high degree of accuracy early in the appearance fo any new future threats like SARS-CoV-2, thus speeding up the development of potential effective treatments and vaccines.



As Slack acquisition rumors swirl, a look at Salesforce’s six biggest deals

As Slack acquisition rumors swirl, a look at Salesforce’s six biggest deals

The rumors ignited last Thursday that Salesforce had interest in Slack. This morning, CNBC is reporting the deal is all but done and will be announced tomorrow. Chances are, this is going to a big number, but this won’t be Salesforce’s first big acquisition. We thought it would be useful in light of these rumors to look back at the company’s biggest deals.

Salesforce has already surpassed $20 billion in annual revenue, and the company has a history of making a lot of deals to fill in the road map and give it more market lift as it searches for ever more revenue.

The biggest deal by far so far was the $15.7 billion Tableau acquisition last year. The deal gave Salesforce a missing data visualization component and a company with a huge existing market to feed the revenue beast. In an interview in August with TechCrunch, Salesforce president and chief operating officer Bret Taylor (who came to the company in the $750 million Quip deal in 2016), sees Tableau as a key part of the company’s growing success:

“Tableau is so strategic, both from a revenue and also from a technology strategy perspective,” he said. That’s because as companies make the shift to digital, it becomes more important than ever to help them visualize and understand that data in order to understand their customers’ requirements better.”

Salesforce is buying data visualization company Tableau for $15.7B in all-stock deal

Next on the Salesforce acquisition hit parade was the $6.5 billion Mulesoft acquisition in 2018. Mulesoft gave Salesforce access to something it didn’t have as an enterprise SaaS company — data locked in silos across the company, even in on-prem applications. The CRM giant could leverage Mulesoft to access data wherever it lived, and when you put the two mega deals together, you could see how you could visualize that data and also give more fuel to its Einstein intelligence layer.

Salesforce is buying MuleSoft at enterprise value of $6.5 billion

In 2016, the company spent $2.8 billion on Demandware to make a big splash in e-Commerce, a component of the platform that has grown in importance during the pandemic when companies large and small have been forced to move their businesses online. The company was incorporated into the Salesforce behemoth and became known as Commerce Cloud.

Salesforce buys Demandware for $2.8B, taking a big step into e-commerce

In 2013, the company made its first billion dollar acquisition when it bought ExactTarget for $2.5 billion. This represented the first foray into what would become the Marketing Cloud. The purchase gave the company entree into the targeted email marketing business, which again would grow increasingly in importance in 2020 when communicating with customers became crucial during the pandemic.

With ExactTarget Acquisition, Salesforce.com Has Spent Close To $3.5 Billion To Get Into The Chief Marketing Officer’s Suite

Last year, just days after closing the Mulesoft acquisition, Salesforce opened its wallet one more time and paid $1.35 billion for ClickSoftware. This one was a nod to the company’s Service cloud, which encompasses both customer service and field service. This acquisition was about the latter, and giving the company access to a bigger body of field service customers.

Salesforce is acquiring ClickSoftware for $1.35B

The final billion deal (until we hear about Slack perhaps) is the $1.33 billion Vlocity acquisition earlier this year. This one was a gift for the core CRM product. Vlocity gave Salesforce several vertical businesses built on the Salesforce platform and was a natural fit for the company. Using Vlocity’s platform, Salesforce could (and did) continue to build on these vertical markets giving it more ammo to sell into specialized markets.

While we can’t know for sure if the Slack deal will happen, it sure feels like it will, and chances are this deal will be even larger than Tableau as the Salesforce acquisition machine keeps chugging along.

Salesforce grabs Vlocity for $1.33B, a startup with $1B valuation



Materialize scores $40 million investment for SQL streaming database

Materialize scores $40 million investment for SQL streaming database

Materialize, the SQL streaming database startup built on top of the open source Timely Dataflow project, announced a $32 million Series B investment today led by Kleiner Perkins with participation from Lightspeed Ventures.

While it was at it, the company also announced a previously unannounced $8 million Series A from last year that had been led by Lightspeed, bringing the total raised to $40 million.

These firms see a solid founding team that includes CEO Arjun Narayan, formerly of Cockroach Labs, and chief scientist Frank McSherry, who created the Timely Flow project on which the company is based.

Narayan says that the company believes fundamentally that every company needs to be a real-time company and it will take a streaming database to make that happen. Further, he says the company is built using SQL because of its ubiquity, and the founders wanted to make sure that customers could access and make use of that data quickly without learning a new query language.

“Our goal is really to help any business to understand streaming data and build intelligent applications without using or needing any specialized skills. Fundamentally what that means is that you’re going to have to go to businesses using the technologies and tools that they understand, which is standard SQL,” Narayan explained.

Bucky Moore, the partner at Kleiner Perkins leading the B round sees this standard querying ability as a key part of the technology. “As more businesses integrate streaming data into their decision making pipelines, the inability to ask questions of this data with ease is becoming a non-starter. Materialize’s unique ability to provide SQL over streaming data solves this problem, laying the foundation for them to build the industry’s next great data platform,” he said.

They would naturally get compared to Confluent, a streaming database built on top of the Apache Kafka open source streaming database project, but Narayan says his company uses straight SQL for querying, while Confluent uses its own flavor.

The company still is working out the commercial side of the house and currently provides a typical service offering for paying customers with support and a service agreement (SLA). The startup is working on a SaaS version of the product, which it expects to release some time next year.

Cockroach Labs scores $86.6M Series D as scalable database resonates

They currently have 20 employees with plans to double that number by the end of next year as they continue to build out the product. As they grow, Narayan says the company is definitely thinking about how to build a diverse organization.

He says he’s found that hiring in general has been challenging during the pandemic, and he hopes that changes in 2021, but he says that he and his co-founders are looking at the top of the hiring funnel because otherwise, as he points out, it’s easy to get complacent and rely on the same network of people you have been working with before, which tends to be less diverse.

“The KPIs and the metrics we really want to use to ensure that we really are putting in the extra effort to ensure a diverse sourcing in your hiring pipeline and then following that through all the way through the funnel. That’s I think the most important way to ensure that you have a diverse [employee base], and I think this is true for every company,” he said.

While he is working remotely now, he sees having multiple offices with a headquarters in NYC when the pandemic finally ends. Some employees will continue to work remotely, but the majority coming into one of the offices.

Confluent lands another big round with $250M Series E on $4.5B valuation



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