Monthly Archives: October 2020

News: Chargebee raises $55 million to help businesses move to subscriptions

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Chargebee, which helps businesses set up and manage their billing, subscription, revenue operations and compliance, said on Tuesday it has raised $55 million in a new financing round as it looks to accelerate its expansion in global markets. The new financing round, a Series F, for the San Francisco and Chennai-based firm was led by

Chargebee, which helps businesses set up and manage their billing, subscription, revenue operations and compliance, said on Tuesday it has raised $55 million in a new financing round as it looks to accelerate its expansion in global markets.

The new financing round, a Series F, for the San Francisco and Chennai-based firm was led by Insight Partners with existing investors Steadview Capital and Tiger Global participating in it. The nine-year-old startup, which kickstarted its journey in India, has raised $105 million to date.

For businesses, setting up and managing subscription service is a complex process. How do you manage the billing when your customers are on a free trial or want to change their subscription plan, for instance? This is where Chargebee comes into the picture.

Chargebee allows individuals, small businesses, and enterprises to automate subscriptions, billing, invoicing, payments and revenue recognition processes. It supports dozens of popular payment gateways including Stripe, Braintree, WorldPay, and PayPal and its global tax management coverage also helps businesses to expand to new markets. MakeSpace, an on-demand storage company, used Chargebee’s services to scale from four markets to 31 in one year, for instance.

The startup offers its services through a range of pricing schemes, including those that vary based on usage and it is able to renew billing cycles based on sign-up dates or other specific dates. It can also selectively route payments and currencies adherent to predefined rules. On the backend, Chargebee customers get a visual organizational chart of their customers and can easily define payment and invoicing responsibilities.

The startup told TechCrunch that businesses across the globe are moving to adopt a subscription model, which has made its platform more crucial than ever. Over 2,500 businesses including Freshworks, Calendly, Linux Academy, Fujitsu, Okta, and Envoy are clients of Chargebee.

Additionally, several businesses and individuals have signed up to the platform in recent months as they navigate the global pandemic. Some of these customers include individuals like teachers and small coffee chains.

Pret-a-manger, a coffee and sandwich super chain, went live with Chargebee after its physical stores were hit by the coronavirus outbreak. It sold 165,000 coffee subscriptions on the launch day.

AJ Malhotra, Vice President at Insight Partners, said there’s a global movement underway where businesses from cars to coffee pods are launching and scaling with a subscription-first model.

The adoption of subscription model has become popular in recent years as businesses from a range of categories including e-commerce and media look to better monetize their services.

“We believe that a steady SaaS-i-fication of the market is already underway, with traditional businesses replicating the best practices of SaaS pricing and business models even outside the realm of software. Subscription businesses today have to be ready at all times to identify and leverage market opportunities rapidly,” said Krish Subramanian, co-founder and CEO of Chargebee, in a statement.

What’s more, the startup provides its subscription invoicing service to customers at no charge until they reach $50,000 in revenue. Chargebee says it processes over $3 billion in revenue each year.

Chargebee, which also has offices in Chennai, Amsterdam, Salt Lake City, and Sydney and customers in over 160 countries, plans to use the fresh capital to further grow its footprints in international markets, an executive told TechCrunch.

News: Tokyo-based virtual reality game developer Thirdverse gets $8.5 million Series A

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Thirdverse, the virtual reality game developer behind “Swords of Gargantua,” has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by JAFCO, with participation from Presence Capital, Sisu Ventures, Incubate Fund and KDDI. Based in Tokyo, Thirdverse was started four years ago as Yomuneco, but relaunched as Thirdverse in June to align with

Thirdverse, the virtual reality game developer behind “Swords of Gargantua,” has raised $8.5 million in Series A funding. The round was led by JAFCO, with participation from Presence Capital, Sisu Ventures, Incubate Fund and KDDI.

Based in Tokyo, Thirdverse was started four years ago as Yomuneco, but relaunched as Thirdverse in June to align with its corporate mission of creating a “Third Place inside the Metaverse,” where “each person has choices in his or her own hands and can live whatever life he or she wants to.” The company is currently focused on multiplayer virtual reality games, but its ultimate goal is to combine virtual reality with blockchain technology to create “VR worlds” where people can create online communities.

The concept has taken on a new relevancy, as COVID-19 related stay-at-home orders prompted organizations to bring gatherings, including conferences, concerts and even their offices, online.

Users have also spent more time playing online games during the pandemic, with titles that have a social element, like “Animal Crossing: New Horizons,” proving especially popular.

Thirdverse is currently preparing to release other virtual reality games, including “Frostpoint VR: Proving Grounds,” a multi-player shooter game that will be available later this year for Oculus Rift, HTC Vive VR and Valve Index headsets.

In a statement, Sisu Ventures and Presence Capital founding partner Paul Bragiel said, “In the rapidly growing VR gaming landscape, Thirdverse stands out as having strong leadership, deep relationships and a big vision to become the category leader in this market.”

News: SpaceX successfully launches another Starlink mission, with over 700 satellites launched to date

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

SpaceX has launched yet another flight of 60 of its Starlink broadband internet satellites. The launch took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:29 AM EDT (4:29 AM PDT) this morning, after having been delayed three times earlier due to scrubs – twice because of weather, and one because of an unusual sensor

SpaceX has launched yet another flight of 60 of its Starlink broadband internet satellites. The launch took off from Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 7:29 AM EDT (4:29 AM PDT) this morning, after having been delayed three times earlier due to scrubs – twice because of weather, and one because of an unusual sensor reading. This is the 12 Starlink mission to date, and it means that over 700 of the SpaceX satellites have now been launched.

The mission included reuse of a Falcon 9 booster stage that had previously flown on two separate missions, including the Crew Dragon Demo-2 launch that carried SpaceX’s first human crew – NASA astronauts Bob Behnken and Doug Hurley. SpaceX successfully recovered the booster with a controlled landing on its ‘Of Course I Still Love You’ drone ship at sea for this mission, too. A recovery of the fairing halves using different recovery ships was also attempted – with one half caught by a ship as planned, while the second missed and fell into the Ocean, but SpaceX will also attempt to fish that part out.

SpaceX is currently in private beta testing of Starlink, optimizing for latency and connection. The company says that it has achieved downlink speeds of up to 100 megabits per second, with very low latency as well. It intends to broaden the beta to the public beginning later this year.

The deployment of these Starlink satellites also went as planned, around an hour following the rocket lift-off.

News: Tipalti receives $150M at a $2B+ valuation after its accounts payable platform sees a surge in use

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Digital transformation has been one of the big enterprise themes of 2020: organizations are doubling down on cloud services both to link up suddenly remote teams and centralize apps, documents and data in a more efficient way. Today, one of the startups that has filled out that story with a cloud-based suite of accounting services

Digital transformation has been one of the big enterprise themes of 2020: organizations are doubling down on cloud services both to link up suddenly remote teams and centralize apps, documents and data in a more efficient way. Today, one of the startups that has filled out that story with a cloud-based suite of accounting services is announcing a major round of funding on the back of massive growth.

Tipalti, an Israeli company that helps businesses manage suppliers, invoices, purchase orders, tax compliance, payments and billing and other accounting services from a single cloud platform, has raised $150 million at a valuation that the company says is now over $2 billion.

The plan is to use the funding to continue enhancing Tipalti’s accounts payable suite with more tools; hire across all departments; and for business development. Tipalti’s aim, according to founder and CEO Chen Amit, is to provide easy to integrate accounts payable services to a base of fast-scaling businesses, which need AP services to function well, but would never consider them core functions of their businesses in themselves.

“Accounts payable is the last area that companies in the mid market would want to invest in,” said founder and CEO Chen Amit. “They will invest in literally anything else other than building software to pay or manage suppliers.”

The round, a Series E, is being led by Durable Capital Partners (the firm founded last year by Henry Ellenbogen, previously a star at T. Rowe Price), with participation also from Greenoaks Capital and existing investor 01 Advisors, the firm co-founded by Twitter alums Dick Costolo and Adam Bain.

Tipalti’s growth comes as the result of a perfect storm of sorts for the startup.

The Covid-19 health pandemic has led to a global economic crunch, and businesses are especially focused now on watching where money is coming in and where it is going.

But at the same time, even before the coronavirus pandemic, Tipalti had been seeing a lot of inbound business from organizations that were scaling fast and looking for solutions that could integrate easily into their current systems.

The backstory and necessity around accounts payable can be told in a few words: it’s a boring but necessary area, and if it goes wrong, it can potentially bring a whole company down because of the tax, fraud and auditing implications.

Tipalti describes accounts payable as “the most time-consuming function in finance”, noting that 47% of finance organizations in a recent survey said they still spend around 520 hours per year on manual accounts payable tasks, with 27% of respondents indicating that their teams dedicate up to 80 people-hours per month on AP tasks, or 1,040 hours annually.

Tipalti, which fittingly means “I’ll handle it” in Hebrew, is positioned as a helper in this context. By way of an API, it integrates with a number of other accounting and tracking platforms that its customers use including NetSuite, Sage, QuickBooks, Affise, Cake, Everflow, HitPath, LinkTrust, Paladin, Tune (HasOffers) and Vidooly and lets companies run and track how payments are being made relative to actives within the organization, all with relatively little input from the companies themselves, essentially giving them time and other resources to focus on other areas.

The pandemic has hit some of Tipalti’s customers hard. But overall, Chen said that it’s seen more business as a result, not just from companies suddenly growing much faster (as in the case, for example, for e-commerce businesses, or those catering to people spending much more time at home and on screens), but from businesses that simply need to pay much more attention to how money is moving around.

In 2020 so far, Tipalti has seen transaction volume on its platform balloon to $12 billion, up 80% on a year ago. It now has some 1,000 customers on its books, with a specifically strong emphasis on fast-growing tech companies. The list includes Amazon Twitch, Amplitude, Roku, Duolingo, Gitlab, Medium, ClassPass, Toast, Automattic, Twitter, Business Insider, GoDaddy, Zola, Boston Globe Media, Noom, Roblox, Headspace, Fiverr, Vimeo, Stack Overflow, ZipRecruiter, AppLovin, Canva, Indeed, and Foursquare.

Indeed, as we have described before, it was Tipalti’s initial work with Twitter on its own accounts payable services (central to how it can make money on its ad business) that served as its first introduction to Costolo and Bain, who went on to invest in it after they left the social network and started 01 Advisors.

“We are pleased to have the opportunity to increase our investment in Tipalti during a time in which organizations have been focused on rapidly transforming and modernizing the way they operate,” said Dick Costolo, Founding Partner of 01 Advisors and former Chief Executive Officer of Twitter, in a statement. “When I ran Twitter, I saw first-hand the importance and value of Tipalti in automating financial operations. Tipalti transformed our processes and opened up our expansion, growth, and scalability strategies.”

It’s worth pointing out that the rise in valuation is a huge spike for Tipalti, a sign not just of its growth but investors’ bet that there will be more of that to come.

Chen Amit, the company’s founder and CEO, said it is four times the size of its valuation in its previous round (it raised $76 million in a Series D round led by 01 Advisors a little over a year ago, which would have been at around a $500 million valuation), and a whopping 14 times what Tipalti was valued in 2017). Indeed, even with other competitors like Bill.com and Coupa also targeting the same users as Tipalti, Amit estimates that between them all, they have just 3-4% of the addressable market.

“The accounts payable automation space has an extremely large total addressable market with significant growth potential,” explained Henry Ellenbogen, Founder, Managing Partner and Chief Investment Officer of Durable Capital Partners LP, in a statement. “We believe that Tipalti has the potential to become a much larger company within the Midmarket space due to its differentiated holistic platform, superior global capabilities and management team. This has resulted in leading retention and customer satisfaction.”

News: Spotify’s new Soundtrap capture app offers collaborative voice notes for songwriters

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Acquired in 2017, Soundtrap more or less serves a similar role as Anchor under the larger Spotify banner — albeit largely focused on music creation, instead of podcasting. The company’s software of the same name is a cloud-based service designed to let musicians remotely collaborate on a song, track by track. It is, honestly, a

Acquired in 2017, Soundtrap more or less serves a similar role as Anchor under the larger Spotify banner — albeit largely focused on music creation, instead of podcasting. The company’s software of the same name is a cloud-based service designed to let musicians remotely collaborate on a song, track by track. It is, honestly, a perfect tool for this moment of social distancing.

Announced this morning, the new Soundtrap Capture builds on that idea, making it more mobile and addressing the earliest stage of the songwriting process. As someone who interviews a lot of musicians on my podcast, I can certainly attest to the fact that Voice Memo has become an increasingly important tool in songwriting. Being in a creative field is a bit of a double-edged sword, in that you’re often able to make your own hours, but inspiration can (and often does) arrive when you least expect it.

The smartphone has become a pretty necessary part of the process for many musicians, as an always-present blank slate into which they can sing or hum inspiration. That’s the underlying principle for Capture. At its heart, the app is a pretty simple Voice Memo tool, with an interface that is basically a giant red record button. Tapping that, the users sings a line, which is saved as a track that can be shared with others. They can then record an overlay. It’s a bit like Voice Memos meets Google Docs.

The app has been in development since last year and in beta since the spring, and honestly, the timing is pretty perfect for many musicians seeking ways to work in the seemingly endless era of social distancing. The app is really just meant for that initial moment of inspiration, which means the controls are pretty limited. You can, for instance, adjust the volume of the tracks, but can’t adjust other levels. You can’t create loops of your found sounds, either — that would be a fun and useful trick, I think, but co-founder Per Emanuelsson tells TechCrunch that Soundtrap considers it an aspect of the songwriting process that generally comes later.

The app features live storage for memos and will add integration to the main Soundtrap Studio app at some point later this year.

News: Spacebit books a second trip to the Moon via NASA’s commercial lunar payload program

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

UK-based robotic rover startup Spacebit has booked a second payload delivery to the Moon, aboard the Nova-C lander that Intuitive Machines is planning to send in 2021 as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Spacebit already has a berth aboard the Astrobotic Peregrine lander that’s set to go to the Moon in

UK-based robotic rover startup Spacebit has booked a second payload delivery to the Moon, aboard the Nova-C lander that Intuitive Machines is planning to send in 2021 as part of NASA’s Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) program. Spacebit already has a berth aboard the Astrobotic Peregrine lander that’s set to go to the Moon in July 2021, flying atop a Vulcan Centaur rocket, and so this would follow quickly on the heels of that mission, with a current mission timeframe of October 2021 to deliver the Intuitive Machines lander via a SpaceX Falcon 9.

Spacebit’s Asagumo 4-legged walking rover is set to fly on that first CLPS mission (which NASA created to source commercial partners for delivering experiments and payloads to the Moon along with over private cargo ahead of its Artemis crewed Moon missions). For this second Nova-C lander launch, Spacebit is preparing a wheeled rover that will carry a small NASA scientific module. Both the wheeled and the walking rover are designed to help assess what kind of resources are available on the surface of the Moon, with the aim of providing support for the Artemis program.

This will provide Spacebit with multiple opportunities to assess the makeup of the regolith (the equivalent of soil for other planets), which is its primary goal with these missions. The different rover designs will also mean it can better assess which is more amenable to the task. The 4-legged design is intended to make the walking rover better able to deal with uneven surfaces, allowing it to potentially even explore lava flow tubes and other cave-like areas that could be suitable for natural shelter and future lunar habitat creation.

News: Security flaw left ‘smart’ chastity sex toy users at risk of permanent lock-in

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Just because almost every gadget or appliance can be connected to the internet, doesn’t mean they should be. Outages can render these “smart” devices useless, and many use weak security that can make them easily hackable. And as security researchers recently found out, the consequences of having a major security flaw in one popular sex

Just because almost every gadget or appliance can be connected to the internet, doesn’t mean they should be. Outages can render these “smart” devices useless, and many use weak security that can make them easily hackable.

And as security researchers recently found out, the consequences of having a major security flaw in one popular sex toy could have been catastrophic for tens of thousands of users.

U.K.-based security firm Pen Test Partners said the flaw in the Qiui Cellmate internet-connected chastity lock, billed as the “world’s first app controlled chastity device,” could have allowed anyone to remotely and permanently lock in the user’s penis.

The Cellmate chastity lock works by allowing a trusted partner to remotely lock and unlock the chamber over Bluetooth using a mobile app. That app communicates with the lock using an API. But that API was left open and without a password, allowing anyone to take complete control of any user’s device.

Because the chamber was designed to lock with a metal ring underneath the user’s penis, the researchers said it may require the intervention of a heavy-duty bolt cutter or an angle grinder to free the user.

Alex Lomas, a researcher at Pen Test Partners, said in a blog post that an attacker could lock “everyone in or out” very quickly. “There is no emergency override function either, so if you’re locked in there’s no way out,” he wrote.

The unsecured API also allowed access to the private messages and the precise location from the user’s app.

A vulnerability in the Qiui’s Cellmate app allowed anyone unauthenticated access to the private messages and location of any user. The lock on the chastity device can also be remotely controlled, researchers said. (Image: Qiui)

TechCrunch first learned of the vulnerability in June. The researchers contacted Qiui, based in China, about the flawed API. Taking the vulnerable API offline would have locked in anyone using the device. The developer pushed out a new API for new users, but left the unsecured API up for existing users.

Qiui chief executive Jake Guo told TechCrunch that a fix would arrive in August, but that deadline came and went. “We are a basement team,” he said. In a follow-up email explaining the risks to users, Guo said: “When we fix it, it creates more problems.”

In the end, Qiui missed the three self-imposed deadlines to fix the vulnerable API, said Lomas.

The decision to go public was made after Pen Test Partners learned of a separate security issue from another researcher, who also found it difficult to get a response from Qiui. “This reinforced our decision to publish: clearly others were likely to find these issues independent of us, so the public interest case was made in our minds,” wrote Lomas.

It’s not known if anyone maliciously exploited the vulnerable API. Several user reviews of the app complained that the app had bugs that would cause the device to stay locked.

“The app stopped working completely after three days and I am stuck!” said one user. Another said they “got already stuck twice when wearing it due to the unreliable app.”

“It worked for about a month until I almost got stuck in it. Thankfully it unlocked itself randomly and I was able to get out of it. The device left a bad scar that took nearly a month of recovery,” said another review.

Qiui joins a long list of sex toys with security problems that inherently don’t exist in non-internet-connected devices. In 2016, researchers say a bug in a Bluetooth-powered “panty buster” let anyone remotely control the sex toy over the internet. In 2017, a smart sex toy maker settled a lawsuit after it was accused of collecting and recording “highly intimate and sensitive data” of its users.

Practice safe sex; don’t use a smart device.

Related stories:

• An adult sexting site exposed thousands of models’ passports and driver’s licenses
• Plenty of Fish app was leaking users’ hidden names and postal codes
• A network of ‘camgirl’ sites exposed millions of users and sex workers
• Tinder’s new personal security feature can protect LGBTQ+ users in hostile nations
• Many smart home device makers still won’t say if they give your data to the government
• Group dating app 3Fun exposed sensitive data on 1.5 million users

News: Dialpad raises $100M Series E at a $1.2B valuation

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Dialpad, the business-centric voice, video and contact-center service, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E funding round led by OMERS Growth Equity. Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, ICONIQ Capital and Work-Bench also participated. The company says its valuation is over $1.2 billion after it has now raised a total of $245 million.

Dialpad, the business-centric voice, video and contact-center service, today announced that it has raised a $100 million Series E funding round led by OMERS Growth Equity. Andreessen Horowitz, Google Ventures, ICONIQ Capital and Work-Bench also participated. The company says its valuation is over $1.2 billion after it has now raised a total of $245 million.

The funding news comes only a few weeks after the company also announced its acquisition of video conferencing service Highfive, a move that brought deeper expertise in mobile video and conferencing room devices to the company.

Recently, Dialpad has put a lot of emphasis on its AI solutions. Back in 2018, it launched its VoiceAI service, for example, and it now offers a number of AI solutions as part of its Voice Intelligence service (or Vi, as the company calls it). This includes a note-taking service, for example, as well as call transcripts and sentiment analysis, among other features.

“We have seen a huge increase in demand for cloud communications tools, and we are raising additional capital to meet this demand,” said Craig Walker, CEO of Dialpad. “Users want a single platform to handle voice, video and messaging. They also want that platform to be smart; to do things like automate note taking and provide real-time insights and answers in response to what’s happening on a call or meeting. We have invested in real-time speech recognition, natural language processing and voice analytics on a system that works anywhere, on any device. Our goal has always been to empower the future of work, and we are thrilled to join the OMERS Growth Equity portfolio and to continue to innovate.”

The company says it now has an annual run rate of over $100 million and its customers include the likes of Uber, Motorola Solutions, Domo and Xero. In total, the 500-employee company says it now has more than 70,000 customers.

News: Europe’s top court confirms no mass surveillance without limits

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Europe’s top court has delivered another slap-down to indiscriminate government mass surveillance regimes. In a ruling today the CJEU has made it clear that national security concerns do not exclude EU Member States from the need to comply with general principles of EU law such as proportionality and respect for fundamental rights to privacy, data

Europe’s top court has delivered another slap-down to indiscriminate government mass surveillance regimes.

In a ruling today the CJEU has made it clear that national security concerns do not exclude EU Member States from the need to comply with general principles of EU law such as proportionality and respect for fundamental rights to privacy, data protection and freedom of expression.

However the court has also allowed for derogations, saying that a pressing national security threat can justify limited and temporary bulk data collection and retention — capped to ‘what is strictly necessary’.

While threats to public security or the need to combat serious crime may also allow for targeted retention of data provided it’s accompanied by ‘effective safeguards’ and reviewed by a court or independent authority.

The reference to the CJEU joined a number of cases, including legal challenges brought by rights advocacy group Privacy International to bulk collection powers baked into the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act; a La Quadrature du Net (and others’) challenge to a 2015 French decree related to specialized intelligence services; and a challenge to Belgium’s 2016 law on collection and retention of comms data.

Civil rights campaigners had been eagerly awaiting today’s judgements from the Grand Chamber, following an opinion by an advisor to the court in January which implied certain EU Member States’ surveillance regimes were breaching the law.

At the time of writing key complainants had yet to issue a response.

Of course a government agency’s definition of how much data collection is ‘strictly necessary’ in a national security context (or, indeed, what constitutes an ‘effective safeguard’) may be rather different to the benchmark of civil rights advocacy groups — so it seems unlikely this ruling will be the last time the CJEU is asked to clarify where the legal limits of mass surveillance lie.

Additionally, the judgement raises interesting questions over the UK’s chances of gaining a data protection adequacy agreement from the European Commission — as it leaves the EU in 2021 at the end of the brexit transition process this year — something it needs for digital data flows from the EU to continue uninterrupted as now.

The problem is the UK’s Investigatory Powers Act (IPA) gives government agencies broad powers to intercept and retain digital communications — but here the CJEU is making it clear that such bulk powers must be the exception, not the statutory rule.

So, again, a battle over definitions could be looming…

Questions have also been raised, via a legal challenge to the IPA in the UK, over its security agencies’ handling of intercepted data — with a court being told last year of systematic breaches of safeguards set out in the legislation. Such revelations also do not bode well for ‘adequacy’.

Another interesting component of today’s CJEU judgement suggests that in EU states with indiscriminate mass surveillance regimes there could be grounds for overturning individual criminal convictions which are based on evidence obtained via such illegal surveillance.

On this, the court writes in a press release: “As EU law currently stands, it is for national law alone to determine the rules relating to the admissibility and assessment, in criminal proceedings against persons suspected of having committed serious criminal offences, of information and evidence obtained by the retention of data in breach of EU law. However, the Court specifies that the directive on privacy and electronic communications, interpreted in the light of the principle of effectiveness, requires national criminal courts to disregard information and evidence obtained by means of the general and indiscriminate retention of traffic and location data in breach of EU law, in the context of such criminal proceedings, where those persons suspected of having committed criminal offences are not in a position to comment effectively on that information and evidence.”

News: Ÿnsect, the makers of the world’s most expensive bug farm, raises another $224 million

• October 6, 2020
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Ÿnsect, the startup building the world’s most high tech bug colony, have added $224 million in equity and debt to an already impressive $148 million cash haul as it looks to commercialize its business. Investors backing the company include the Los Angeles-based investment firm Upfront Ventures and the FootPrint Coalition, an investment vehicle financed by

Ÿnsect, the startup building the world’s most high tech bug colony, have added $224 million in equity and debt to an already impressive $148 million cash haul as it looks to commercialize its business.

Investors backing the company include the Los Angeles-based investment firm Upfront Ventures and the FootPrint Coalition, an investment vehicle financed by celebrity superhero Robert Downey Jr.

The financing, which includes $139 million in debt and another $65 million in equity will be used to fund the construction of the world’s largest insect farm in Amiens, France — set to open in early 2022.

Why invest a total of $372 million in equity and debt into bug farms? For Ÿnsect, it’s all about protein… and fish. Lots of fish.

See fish farming is an exploding industry even as the numbers of wild caught fish dwindle thanks to rising consumer demand and declining supplies thanks to ocean acidification and warming waters caused by climate change.

Industrial fish farming requires a lot of protein — and the sources of that protein are not good enough to keep industrial farmed fish healthy.

Ÿnsect hopes to change that by providing insect protein for things like fish food and fertilizer — and eventually pet food and (farther down the road) even food for people.

“Ÿnsect isn’t just about insect farming: With climate change and increasing populations worldwide, we need to produce more food with less available land and fewer resources, so that we’re not clearing forests and emptying our oceans. We believe Ÿnsect can play a pivotal role in this global solution,” co-founder and CEO Antoine Hubert said in a statement.

The company’s high-tech, vertical insect farms (primarily raising mealworms) are perfect proteins for the fish and can replace the limited sources of protein the industry currently relies on, according to investors like Upfront Ventures’ Yves Sisteron.

“Oceans are emptying and fish farms are taking over. We’re approaching 50 percent of fish coming from fish farms,” said Sisteron. “One of the main ingredients of fish feed comes from fish. These are from trawlers that rake the bottom of the ocean for anchovies that are combined with a protein paste that is fed to fish for fish farms. And that is basically not sustainable. The amounts in question are gigantic. Globally there’s about 44 million tons of fishfeed per year that is fed to farmed fish.”

Ÿnsect’s mealworms actually provide the fish with a lower-cost, higher quality protein, Sisteron said. “What Ÿnsect is solving is: Can we feed those fish a different kind of protein that will be scalable and also nutrient rich for the fish,” he said.

Ÿnsect transforms insects (and mealworms in particular) into proteins for animals and plants. The company is building full-stack factories that are fully automated, from insect reproduction to sterilization, sorting and packaging.

When the Amiens-based farm is open for business, the company expects to produce 100,000 tons of insect products annually. 500 people will work directly and indirectly on the project.

For the Downey Jr.-backed FootPrint Coalition Ventures, Ÿnsect’s combination of sustainable protein cultivation and massive end markets represented a compelling investment opportunity and a chance to back another company doing its part to combat climate change, according to founding partner Jonathan Schulhof.

It’s the firm’s second publicly disclosed investment after the bamboo-based toilet paper company Cloud Paper.

“We find the aquaculture industry to be absolutely fascinating and we think what they’re doing in that industry is vital,” Schulhof said.

Upfront and FootPrint are joining previous investors like Astanor Ventures along with other financial backers including Happiness Capital, Supernova Invest and Armat Group.

Caisse des Dépôts, Crédit Agricole Brie Picard and Caisse d’Epargne Hauts-de-France are the top banks contributing to today’s financing by providing a credit line. Some of them are taking some equity and other banks are also participating. Overall, Ÿnsect has raised $425 million since 2011.

Companies have already committed $105 million worth of contracts. Clients include wine growing company Torres, fish feed company Skretting and plant fertilizer company Compo Group.

In the future, Ÿnsect also plans to expand to the U.S. and manufacture new products, such as wet pet food.