Daily Archives: January 13, 2021

News: Dell’s 40-inch curved monitor is perfect for a home office command center

• January 13, 2021
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Dell’s kicking off 2021 with a new addition to its monitor lineup that aims to hit a variety of sweet spots. The Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD monitor offers 39.7″ of screen real estate, with a 5120 x 2160 resolution that matches the pixel density of 4K resolution on a 32-inch conventional widescreen display. It

Dell’s kicking off 2021 with a new addition to its monitor lineup that aims to hit a variety of sweet spots. The Dell UltraSharp 40 Curved WUHD monitor offers 39.7″ of screen real estate, with a 5120 x 2160 resolution that matches the pixel density of 4K resolution on a 32-inch conventional widescreen display. It comes equipped with Thunderbolt 3 for display and data connectivity, as well as 90W of charging for compatible computers, and a 10Gbps Ethernet connection for networking. In short, Dell’s latest (which is available beginning January 28) looks to be a true ‘one display to rule them all’ contender, particularly for those searching for a way to optimize their home offices.

The basics

Dell’s UltraSharp 40 has a 60Hz, 39.7″ diagonal display in 21:9 aspect ratio with WUHD resolution (not quite true 5K, but exceptional for a curved monitor this size). It offers 100% sRGB and 98% P3 color reproduction, and comes with a stand that has height adjustability, tilt and swivel, and that features a hidden cable channel for cable management. Built-in speakers provide 9W each of sound reproduction so you don’t need to worry about adding externals.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

In terms of wired connections, it offers Thunderbolt 3, RJ45 Ethernet, and USB 10Gps ports (three on the rear, and one in front) as well as one USB-C port for easy access on the front. There’s also 3.5mm audio line out (though it’s worth noting that this doesn’t work with headphones), and two HDMI ports plus one DisplayPort for more traditional display connectivity if you’re not going the Thunderbolt route. Finally, a standard security lock slot allows you to anchor the display in any shared environment.

The display itself is bright, clear and viewable at a wide range of angles, with a more matte finish that provides excellent viewing in a wide range of lighting conditions. A joystick control button provides easy navigation and operation of the built-in on-screen menu and integrated features, including picture-in-picture.

Design and features

First and foremost, the Dell UltraSharp 40 delivered excellent visual quality. Especially for a display this size, in a curved form factor, at this resolution, it’s going to be something that satisfies everyone from telecommuters mostly handling meetings and spreadsheets, to photographers and video professionals looking for image quality that is highly color-accurate and provides crystal clear detail.

The WUHD resolution means that you can run the display in a range of different configurations, depending on how much screen real estate you want or need. For instance, I’ve been using it at the 5160 x 2160 res, and it provides ample workspace for arranging multiple windows side-by-side, and tiled vertically. I typically use three displays at once in my day job (there’s a lot of tab and browser windows involved) and the Dell UltraSharp 40 makes it so that I can comfortably work with just a single monitor instead. It’ll work with Apple’s HiDPI modes on its modern Macs for clear and crisp visuals with larger on-screen elements, too, however, if you don’t need all that room.

Dell’s integrated stand is simple and effective, providing a range of maneuverability options that allow for significant travel in height adjustment. You won’t get a portrait mode full swivel in this display – but that’s not surprising given how long it is on its longest edge, compared to the vertical. You do get tilt if you need it, and the ability to angle back and forwards depending on how you have it positioned. The end result is a display that’s very large, but easy enough to adjust for your comfortable use.

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

The display comes calibrated out of the box, but also includes plenty of options for adjusting things like contrast and brightness using the built-in menus. This also including a very useful multi-device display setup, including both picture-in-picture features for multiple sources, and a picture-by-picture mode that splits the display into two equal side-by-side sections for multiple inputs. Another useful feature for working with the display with multiple computers: keyboards and mice connected via the monitor will automatically detect and switch between controlling both connected PCs.

Besides the display size and resolution, the other thing that makes the UltraSharp 40 a fantastic option for a home workstation is its range of ports and added bonuses like built-in speakers. The speakers aren’t going to win any audiophile awards, but they’re better than the ones that come built into your laptop and they obviate the need for additional equipment if you’re looking to spare your desk surface space. With any modern Thunderbolt-equipped Mac, the Dell UltraSharp 40 really is a one-cable wonder that offers very little in the way of compromises.

Bottom line

Image Credits: Darrell Etherington

With the Dell UltraSharp 40, the company continues its tradition of delivering extremely high-quality display products at a reasonable price. The $2,100 price tag may seem steep, but for what you’re getting it’s a very fair price point, and Dell’s displays also have very high reliability that means an investment in their monitors is likely to keep you satisfied for many years to come (two of my home office displays are some of Dell’s very first 4K monitors, which have served me reliably for over half a decade).

Because of its wide aspect ratio and curve, this display really does replace two smaller 4K screens for most uses, and so the cost framed that way actually makes even more sense. In short, Dell’s UltraSharp 40 is a home office beast, which fills a sweet spot for a wide range of remote professionals.

News: Netflix releases latest diversity numbers

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Netflix has released its first-ever diversity and inclusion report. Though, it’s not the first time Netflix has shared this type of data. Netflix has shared representation numbers since 2013, but the company had not put a bow on it until now. Worldwide, women make up 47.1% of Netflix’s workforce. Since 2017, representation of white and

Netflix has released its first-ever diversity and inclusion report. Though, it’s not the first time Netflix has shared this type of data. Netflix has shared representation numbers since 2013, but the company had not put a bow on it until now.

Worldwide, women make up 47.1% of Netflix’s workforce. Since 2017, representation of white and Asian employees has been on a slow decline, while representation of Hispanic or Latinx, Black, mixed race and folks from native populations has been on the rise. In the U.S., Netflix is 8.1% Hispanic or Latinx, 8% Black, and 5.1% of its employees are mixed race, while 1.3% of employees are either Native American, Native Alaskan, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and/or from the Middle East or North Africa.

Netflix’s representation of people of color at the leadership level is not perfect but it’s certainly better than that of its counterparts in the tech industry. The company’s leadership team is 15.7% Asian, 9.5% Black, 4.9% Hispanic and 4.1% of Netflix’s higher-ups are mixed race.

Netflix has not laid out any concrete goals, but says it’s generally wanting to increase representation by hiring more inclusively and building out its recruiting networks, its VP of inclusion and diversity, Vernā Myers, said in the report. Additionally, Netflix says it wants to focus more on increasing inclusion and representation of folks outside of the U.S., as well as find a way to measure what the company called “inclusion health.”

News: Stacklet raises $18M for its cloud governance platform

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Stacklet, a startup that is commercializing the Cloud Custodian open-source cloud governance project, today announced that it has raised an $18 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Addition, with participation from Foundation Capital and new individual investor Liam Randall, who is joining the company as VP of business development. Addition and Foundation Capital also

Stacklet, a startup that is commercializing the Cloud Custodian open-source cloud governance project, today announced that it has raised an $18 million Series A funding round. The round was led by Addition, with participation from Foundation Capital and new individual investor Liam Randall, who is joining the company as VP of business development. Addition and Foundation Capital also invested in Stacklet’s seed round, which the company announced last August. This new round brings the company’s total funding to $22 million.

Stacklet helps enterprises manage their data governance stance across different clouds, accounts, policies and regions, with a focus on security, cost optimization and regulatory compliance. The service offers its users a set of pre-defined policy packs that encode best practices for access to cloud resources, though users can obviously also specify their own rules. In addition, Stacklet offers a number of analytics functions around policy health and resource auditing, as well as a real-time inventory and change management logs for a company’s cloud assets.

The company was co-founded by Travis Stanfield (CEO) and Kapil Thangavelu (CTO). Both bring a lot of industry expertise to the table. Stanfield spent time as an engineer at Microsoft and leading DealerTrack Technologies, while Thangavelu worked at Canonical and most recently in Amazon’s AWSOpen team. Thangavelu is also one of the co-creators of the Cloud Custodian project, which was first incubated at Capital One, where the two co-founders met during their time there, and is now a sandbox project under the Cloud Native Computing Foundation’s umbrella.

“When I joined Capital One, they had made the executive decision to go all-in on cloud and close their data centers,” Thangavelu told me. “I got to join on the ground floor of that movement and Custodian was born as a side project, looking at some of the governance and security needs that large regulated enterprises have as they move into the cloud.”

As companies have sped up their move to the cloud during the pandemic, the need for products like Stacklets has also increased. The company isn’t naming most of its customers, but one of them is FICO, among a number of other larger enterprises. Stacklet isn’t purely focused on the enterprise, though. “Once the cloud infrastructure becomes — for a particular organization — large enough that it’s not knowable in a single person’s head, we can deliver value for you at that time and certainly, whether it’s through the open source or through Stacklet, we will have a story there.” The Cloud Custodian open-source project is already seeing serious use among large enterprises, though, and Stacklet obviously benefits from that as well.

“In just 8 months, Travis and Kapil have gone from an idea to a functioning team with 15 employees, signed early Fortune 2000 design partners and are well on their way to building the Stacklet commercial platform,” Foundation Capital’s Sid Trivedi said. “They’ve done all this while sheltered in place at home during a once-in-a-lifetime global pandemic. This is the type of velocity that investors look for from an early-stage company.”

Looking ahead, the team plans to use the new funding to continue to developed the product, which should be generally available later this year, expand both its engineering and its go-to-market teams and continue to grow the open-source community around Cloud Custodian.

News: Facebook’s EU-US data transfers face their final countdown

• January 13, 2021
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Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has agreed to swiftly finalize a long-standing complaint against Facebook’s international data transfers which could force the tech giant to suspend data flows from the European Union to the US within in a matter of months. The complaint, which was filed in 2013 by privacy campaigner Max Schrems, relates to

Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) has agreed to swiftly finalize a long-standing complaint against Facebook’s international data transfers which could force the tech giant to suspend data flows from the European Union to the US within in a matter of months.

The complaint, which was filed in 2013 by privacy campaigner Max Schrems, relates to the clash between EU privacy rights and US government intelligent agencies’ access to Facebook users’ data under surveillance programs that were revealed in high resolution detail by NSA whistleblower Edward Snowden.

The DPC has made the commitment to a swift resolution of Schrems’ complaint now in order to settle a judicial review of its processes which noyb, his privacy campaign group, filed last year in response to its decision to pause his complaint and opt to open a new case procedure.

Under the terms of the settlement Schrems will also be heard in the DPC’s “own volition” procedure, as well as getting access to all submissions made by Facebook — assuming the Irish courts allow that investigation to go ahead, noyb said today.

And while noyb acknowledged there may (yet) be a further pause, as/if the DPC waits on a High Court judgement of Facebook’s own Judicial Review of its processes before revisiting the original complaint, Schrems suggests his 7.5 year old complaint could at long last be headed for a final decision within a matter of months…

“The courts in Ireland would be reluctant to give a deadline and the DPC played that card and said they can’t provide a timeline… So we got the maximum that’s possible under Irish law. Which is ‘swift’,” he told TechCrunch, describing this as “frustrating but the maximum possible”.

Asked for his estimate of when a final decision will at last close out the complaint, he suggested it could be as soon as this summer — but said that more “realistically” it would be fall.

Schrems has been a vocal critic of how the DPC has handled his complaint — and more widely of the slow pace of enforcement of the bloc’s data protection rules vs fast-moving tech giants — with Ireland’s regulator choosing to raise wider concerns about the legality of mechanisms for transferring data from the EU to the US, rather than ordering Facebook to suspend data flows as Schrems had asked in the complaint.

The saga has already had major ramifications — leading to a landmark ruling by Europe’s top court last summer when the CJEU struck down a flagship EU-US data transfer arrangement after it found the US does not provide the same high standards of protection for personal data as the EU does.

The CJEU also made it clear that EU data protection regulators have a duty to step in and suspend transfers to third countries when data is at risk — putting the ball squarely back in Ireland’s court.

Reached for comment on the latest development the DPC told us it would have a response later today. So we’ll update this report when we have it.

The DPC, which is Facebook’s lead data regulator in the EU under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), sent the tech giant a preliminary order to suspend data transfers back in September — following the landmark ruling by the CJEU.

However Facebook immediately filed a legal challenge — couching the DPC’s order as premature, despite the complaint itself being more than seven years old.

noyb said today that it’s expecting Facebook to continue to try to use the Irish courts to delay enforcement of EU law. And the tech giant admitted last year that it’s using the courts to ‘send a signal’ to lawmakers to come up with a political resolution for an issue that affects scores of businesses which also transfer data between the EU and the US, as well as to buy time for a new US administration to be in a position to grapple with the issue.

But the clock is now ticking on how much longer Zuckerberg can play this game of regulatory whack-a-mole. And a final reckoning for Facebook’s EU data flows could come within half a year.

This sets a fairly tight deadline for any negotiations between EU and US lawmakers over a replacement for the defunct EU-US Privacy Shield.

European commissioners said last fall that no replacement would be possible without reform of US surveillance law. And whether such radical retooling of US law could come as soon as the summer, or even fall, seems doubtful — unless there’s a major effort among US companies to lobby their own lawmakers to make the necessary changes.

In court documents Facebook filed last year, linked to its challenge of the DPC’s preliminary order, the tech giant suggested it might have to close service in Europe if EU law is enforced against its data transfers.

However its PR chief, Nick Clegg, swiftly denied Facebook would ever pull service — instead urging EU lawmakers to look favorably on its data-dependent business model by claiming that “personalized advertising” is vital to the EU’s post-COVID-19 economic recovery.

The consensus among the bloc’s digital lawmakers, however, is that tech giants need more regulation, not less.

Separately today, an opinion by an influential advisor to the CJEU could have implications for how swiftly GDPR is enforced in Europe in the future if the court aligns with Advocate General Bobek’s opinion — as he appears to be taking aim at bottlenecks that have formed in key jurisdictions like Ireland as a result of the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism for handling cross-border cases.

So while Bobek confirms the general competence of a lead regulator to investigate in cross-border cases, he also writes that “the lead data protection authority cannot be deemed as the sole enforcer of the GDPR in cross-border situations and must, in compliance with the relevant rules and time limits provided for by the GDPR, closely cooperate with the other data protection authorities concerned, the input of which is crucial in this area”.

He also sets out specific conditions where national DPAs could bring their own proceedings, in his view, including for the purpose of adopting “urgent measures” or to intervene “following the lead data protection authority having decided not to handle a case”, among other delineated reasons.

Responding to the AG’s opinion, the DPC’s deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle, told us: “We, along with our colleague EU DPAs, note the opinion of the Advocate General and await the final judgment of the Court in terms of its interpretation of any relevant One Stop Shop rules.”

Asked for a view on the AG’s remarks, Jef Ausloos, a postdoc researcher in data privacy at the University of Amsterdam, said the opinion conveys “a clear recognition that ACTUAL protection and enforcement might be crippled by the [one-stop-shop] mechanism”.

However he suggested any new openings for DPAs to bypass a lead regulator that could flow from the opinion aren’t likely to shake things up in the short term. “I think the door is open for some changes/bypassing DPC. BUT, only in the long run,” he said. 

News: Webflow raises $140M, pushing its valuation to $2.1 billion

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This morning Webflow, a software company that helps businesses build no-code websites, announced that it has raised a $140 million Series B. The round, led by returning investors Accel and Silversmith, comes after the startup raised $72 million in an August, 2019 Series A. The new funding values Webflow at more than $2.1 billion it

This morning Webflow, a software company that helps businesses build no-code websites, announced that it has raised a $140 million Series B. The round, led by returning investors Accel and Silversmith, comes after the startup raised $72 million in an August, 2019 Series A.

The new funding values Webflow at more than $2.1 billion it said in a blog post that TechCrunch viewed before publication. Capital G, an Alphabet venture capital group, joined the Series B as well, with its investor Laela Sturdy joining the startup’s board.

Webflows offers a software that helps customers build websites without the need to write code; the company also offers hosting, and content-related capabilities.

Webflow’s product fits into a category of companies arguing that building software for the Internet should get easier over time, not harder. TechCrunch explored the no-code, low-code space 2020, including asking investors bullish on its market about their views concerning its future.

Webflow CEO Vlad Magdalin described the round as “opportunistic” for the company, telling TechCrunch that his company was not low on cash when the deal came together. Indeed, Magdalin said that his company ended 2020 cash-flow positive.

So why raise more money, let alone such a huge round? The CEO described the funds as “courage capital,” funds that will allow it to make investments into its business that may not have short-term revenue impacts. Magdalin said that the money may be spent on its enterprise products, support team, platform, and recruiting.

In an email, Accel investor, and Webflow board member Arun Mathew echoed the CEO’s comments, adding that the company doubled its customer base in 2020.

That Webflow managed to break into the realm of startup profitability is less surprising when we recall that the no-code software company bootstrapped for more than a half-decade before taking external funds; it’s done this before.

Raising capital has other impacts on a business than the ability to raise spend. New capital, a higher valuation, and noise about a business can bolster recruiting efforts, and assuage customers concerned that the startup in question could either evaporate due to a lack of cash, or wind up bought, and either stripped by a private-equity firm, or subsumed by a tech giant.

Big companies don’t want to tie themselves to a product that could disappear. Webflow, now valued at $2.1 billion after its Series B closed, may have allayed those concerns for the time being.

Asked how 2020 went for the company, Magdalin said that its business doubled, which he described as an acceleration of its previous results.

It’s not clear from our vantage point if the company is in the eight, or nine-figure revenue range, so it’s hard to vet how strong a roughly 100% growth rate is for Webflow; that it appears to have bested its 2019 growth rate in 2020 is encouraging for its future IPO prospects.

The company could see strong growth in 2021. Webflow’s CEO told TechCrunch that his company’s move up-market is starting to bear fruit. After noting that average contract values, or ACV, for its larger accounts were several orders of magnitude bigger than its sales agreements with SMBs, Magdalin said that its enterprise customers only account for around 5% of its present-day business today.

However, the CEO said that his firm had only begun to target the enterprise cohort last year, and expects to grow its larger-account business by a factor of ten this year.

And the company has big product plans, including building out its service to support richer and more powerful website creation. In the CEO’s view, websites are merely part of the software world, and he expects no-code tooling to take on more and more complex software tasks over time.

That could expand the broader no-code market, in our view, perhaps creating more space for startups to build services that allow for non-developers to depend less on engineering teams over time.

Mathew shares Magdalin’s bullish view on the no-code market, saying in an email that “the market is moving very quickly to being bullish on no-code tooling,” adding that we are “still very early in the adoption curve.”

Given that take, it’s not hard to see why Accel would want to double-down on Webflow. Accel has a history of making large-dollar bets into companies that bootstrapped to scale, including Webflow and Qualtrics. In the Qualtrics example, Accel led its Series A, B, and C, rounds worth a combined total of $400 million.

To see Accel lead another round for Webflow, then, is in-keeping with prior investing patterns from the firm.

Capital G’s Sturdy, Webflow’s new board member, told TechCrunch in an email that her firm has been “bullish on the massive potential of no code for years,” leading it to hunt for “the most promising companies utilizing no code to transform sectors and democratize access to key tools.” Let’s see what it can do with another huge check and some time.

News: Loop launches out of stealth to make auto insurance more equitable

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Car auto-insurance from legacy providers has structural bias built into it. It uses metrics such as credit score, income, marital status and education to figure out insurance rates, which eventually disproportionately hurts low-income individuals through high rates and low protection. Loop, co-founded by John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, hopes to launch an alternative model

Car auto-insurance from legacy providers has structural bias built into it. It uses metrics such as credit score, income, marital status and education to figure out insurance rates, which eventually disproportionately hurts low-income individuals through high rates and low protection.

Loop, co-founded by John Henry and Carey Anne Nadeau, hopes to launch an alternative model that is equitable for all communities.

“Structural bias is baked into financial services and institutions that perpetuate and reinforce [it],” said Nadeau, who has worked at Brookings Institute and studied at MIT around topics of mobility. “We can’t just focus on banking, [and] insurance is sort of the overlooked ugly stepchild in the world view of financial services.”

How to rewrite the rules

Loop is a managing general agent (MGA) business so it can act as a broker and a vendor in the insurance space. It markets, acquires and services customers, instead of serving simply as a vendor built atop an existing insurance provider. The startup, also a B corp, is prioritizing profit alongside the environment and social dynamics.

The startup is trying to rewrite the rules of auto insurance by using two key metrics to track, create and charge insurance rates: state of roads and driver behavior. Loop bases rates off of usage, while a legacy provider might base rates off of demographics.

Loop is a mobile-only product that vertically integrates with insurance carriers.

Once a user downloads an app, Loop will find a quote for the user based on their location. The secret sauce is Loop’s tech: Using a database of over 100 million car crashes in 27 states, Loop creates a quote for a user based on their location. Henry, who co-founded Harlem Capital, describes Loop’s data is “almost a God-level understanding of crashes that have occurred on each, individual road.”

The startup also uses data around traffic volume, roadway infrastructure and weather data to set rates. The artificial intelligence capabilities could allow Loop to, say, steer a driver off of a road that has high-risk for crashes. Or it could simply reward them for clearing the road without a bumper scratch.

Image Credits: Loop

The other part of its business is based on telematics technology, which allows Loop to understand how and where a driver is going at all times. While legacy carriers might use lack of accidents to incentivize lower rates, Loop is using data to both set the rate and lower it.

Exchanging data for more flexibility could raise some eyebrows, but the co-founders think their customer-base, largely millennials and Gen Z, are comfortable with the model as it promises fairer prices. Loop makes a gross commission on every policy it sells.

Loop also pointed to Ohio-based Root Insurance as an example of how consumers are growing more comfortable with sharing location data. The car insurance startup went public in what many saw as a successful IPO for a midwestern high-growth tech company. Root similarly uses metrics like driver performance and history with telematics technology.

“They use telematics but they still are largely using legacy insurance models,” says Henry. “We’re kind of replacing that with our own AI based approach.”

Root might be the most obvious competitor, but usage-based pricing has been a rising dynamic in insurance for over a decade through various forms. Flexible insurtech has been on a tear recently, with MetroMile’s SPAC, Lemonade’s IPO and, on the early-stage front, Marshmallow, a U.K. based auto insurance startup last valued at $130 million.

The co-founders are confident that their technology is differentiated enough to survive the hot competition.

A racial reckoning and a tweet

The idea for the startup began in July 2020, when George Floyd, a Black man, was murdered by police. Protests erupted across the world, rallying for change and solutions to address systemic racism. VC firms rushed to support Black founders, and Henry saw a gap in solutions committed to change.

Henry tweeted in reaction:

“It occurred to me that the change that we’re looking for was not gonna just bring itself about,” Henry said. “It takes intentional tackling of systemic issues.” He knew Nadeau had focused on transportation and mobility, and the duo eventually decided that they would “swing big.”

Carey Anne Nadeau and John Henry, the co-founders of Loop. Image Credits: Loop

While the co-founders admit the goal is ambitious, they have secured investors that think Loop could be a big business one day. The startup tells TechCrunch that it has raised a $3.25 million seed round led by Freestyle VC, with participation from Blue Fog Capital, Fontinalis Capital Partners, Concrete Rose, Uprising Ventures and Backstage Capital. Participating angel investors include Kristen Dickey, Steve Schlafman, Songe LaRon, Craig J. Lewis, Gerard Adams and Joshua Dorkin.

The money will be used for hiring and developing its data science infrastructure. It’s not live in the market yet, but is launching in Ohio, Illinois, Pennsylvania and New York (pending regulatory approval, of course).

The team met up with 77 investors, 25% of which were female investors, to get the funding needed to start Loop.

“It was more difficult than we thought,” said Henry. “We knew from the jump that we wanted to raise a larger seed round to signal to the market that we were looking to grow big.”

Loop eventually closed the goal round and valuation. As for the tipping point that got investors to back a company disrupting a $256 million industry with around $3 million in seed financing?

Mission, Henry says.

“I literally have goosebumps right now because the mission will open doors that profit cannot,” he said.

News: Rho, a startup bank aimed at high-growth businesses, raises $15M Series A led by M13 Ventures

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Rho Technologies, the NYC-based fintech behind Rho Business Banking, has raised a $15 million Series A round led by M13 Ventures with participation from Torch Capital, and Inspired Capital. The company will use the proceeds to further expand their commercial banking platform aimed at high-growth businesses, starting with today’s launch of Rho AP. The platform

Rho Technologies, the NYC-based fintech behind Rho Business Banking, has raised a $15 million Series A round led by M13 Ventures with participation from Torch Capital, and Inspired Capital. The company will use the proceeds to further expand their commercial banking platform aimed at high-growth businesses, starting with today’s launch of Rho AP. The platform is oriented towards companies that need more autonomy in business banking and will map quite well to the current distributed nature of work, post-pandemic.

After raising capital and launching in December 2020, the platform now claims to be handling over $2 billion per year in annualized transaction volume for its clients. Rho AP expands on the core banking platform, by enabling companies to run full accounts payable lifecycles right within Rho, meaning invoices are uploaded, approved, coded, and paid – all within Rho. Companies no longer need another payables solution in addition to their bank account.

Rho’s platform approach consists of a single solution that encompasses both collaborative finance software and commercial-grade banking. It was founded by former Point72 and Deutsche Bank alum Everett Cook (CEO) and British-Canadian serial entrepreneur Alex Wheldon. Banking services are provided by Evolve Bank and Trust, member FDIC.

In a statement, Cook said: “At Rho, we are dedicated to empowering the teams that run today’s growing companies. We’ve developed the modern commercial banking platform built around the way companies operate today: distributed, team-oriented, transparent and built for scale. Rho AP is the next step on our mission to help teams work better together with money.”

Latif Peracha, General Partner at M13 and board member at Rho said: “We knew Rho had product-market fit when we discovered that several of our portfolio companies which span different sectors and sizes chose Rho for their banking needs. We believe there is an opportunity to build a powerful brand in business banking that treats the enterprise – and specifically, the CFO – as a consumer, and Rho has done that with a fully integrated product that makes managing a business much easier.”

Wheldon said: “Having built and scaled multiple businesses, I’d always found that commercial banking was a major point of friction. Rho is empowering the whole organization to work better together by removing the silos and bottlenecks associated with finance.”

News: Bryte raises $24m, pivots from selling $8k AI-powered mattresses to licensing its tech

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Bryte today announced $24M in Series A funding led by ARCHina Capital. This comes as the company moves away from selling its $8,000 mattress direct to consumers and instead is working with partners who would utilize Bryte’s technology in their mattresses. Bryte says several deals are in the works. According to the company, this pivot

Bryte today announced $24M in Series A funding led by ARCHina Capital. This comes as the company moves away from selling its $8,000 mattress direct to consumers and instead is working with partners who would utilize Bryte’s technology in their mattresses.

Bryte says several deals are in the works.

According to the company, this pivot has always been part of the plan. They feel that through licensing, they can better accomplish the company’s goal of improving people’s sleep experience. Bryte doesn’t want to become another direct to consumer brand, but rather the underlying technology in some of the best mattresses.

The company’s original product is still available to consumers. Called the Restorative Bed, the mattress has built-in sensors and 100 computer-controlled pneumatic coils that work with the platform as it learns the owners’ sleeping patterns and adjusts to best suit them — for both sleepers. Bryte says its technology enables better sleep patterns by adjusting the mattress through monitoring temperature, pressure points, and room environment.

The user selects several starting points for the mattress system. The system uses micro-adjustments to fine-tune the system to the sleeper. Each night’s sleep provides the mattress with more data points, which it uses to continually adjust the settings. The company says the greatest gains happen within 2-4 weeks and tend to reach an optimal level within 90 days.

With this funding round, the company is adding serious cash to its mission.

ARCHina Capital lead the $24M Series A funding round, with ARCHina’s Co-Founder Amy Huang joining Bryte’s board. The round also included investors John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe, and Dave Mooring, former President of Rambus.

News: Apple announces new projects related to its $100 million pledge for racial equity and justice

• January 13, 2021
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Last June, Apple committed $100 million to a Racial Equity and Justice Initiative (REJI). Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, is leading the initiative. Today, Apple is sharing some of its work as part of the initiative. “We’re launching REJI’s latest initiatives with partners across a broad range of industries

Last June, Apple committed $100 million to a Racial Equity and Justice Initiative (REJI). Lisa Jackson, Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives, is leading the initiative. Today, Apple is sharing some of its work as part of the initiative.

“We’re launching REJI’s latest initiatives with partners across a broad range of industries and backgrounds — from students to teachers, developers to entrepreneurs, and community organizers to justice advocates — working together to empower communities that have borne the brunt of racism and discrimination for far too long. We are honored to help bring this vision to bear, and to match our words and actions to the values of equity and inclusion we have always prized at Apple,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in a statement.

The company will contribute $25 million to the Propel Center, an innovation and leaning hub for Historically Black Colleges and Universities. It is going to be both a virtual platform and a physical campus in the Atlanta University Center. Apple is sharing some early renderings of the new building (see above and below).

Students will be able to follow different educational tracks focused on artificial intelligence, agricultural technologies, social justice, entertainment, app development, augmented reality, design and create arts and entrepreneurship. This isn’t just a monetary investment for Apple as employees will help develop curricula and provide mentorship as well. There will be internship opportunities for students.

In Downtown Detroit, the company will also open an Apple Developer Academy focused on young Black entrepreneurs. This is a collaborative effort with Michigan State University. It’ll be open to all learners across Detroit and teach valuable skills for entrepreneurs, creators and coders.

There will be two programs. A 30-day introductory program will help you learn more about app economy careers. And if you’re willing to dive deeper, there’s an intensive 10- to 12-month program. Apple is trying to reach 1,000 students per year with these two programs.

The third effort is focused on investment opportunities for Black and Brown entrepreneurs. Apple will invest $10 million with Harlem Capital, a VC firm based in New York. There will be more collaboration between Harlem Capital and Apple down the road.

Apple is also investing $25 million in Siebert Williams Shank’s Clear Vision Impact Fund. Finally, Apple is making a contribution to The King Center.

As you can see, Apple’s Racial Equity and Justice Initiative is an on-going effort that requires evaluating new opportunities constantly. The company isn’t just trying to give money to everyone. It is evaluating each opportunity individually to find the best collaboration.

Image Credits: Apple

News: Rapyd raises $300M on a $2.5B valuation to boost its fintech-as-a-service API

• January 13, 2021
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A wave of organizations — propelled by global Covid-19 pandemic circumstances — are moving their commercial and financial interactions online, and today one of the big players helping to enable that shift is announcing a significant round of growth funding to expand the tools and services that provides to them. Rapyd, which provides an API-based

A wave of organizations — propelled by global Covid-19 pandemic circumstances — are moving their commercial and financial interactions online, and today one of the big players helping to enable that shift is announcing a significant round of growth funding to expand the tools and services that provides to them.

Rapyd, which provides an API-based “fintech-as-a-service” platform covering payments, banking services, fraud protection and more, has raised $300 million, funding that CEO and co-founder Arik Shtilman said in an interview will be used to expand its team, build out more technology (next up: expanded fraud ID services and a wider marketplace), and to make selected acquisitions.

Rapyd’s customer base now numbers about 5,000 businesses, which includes marketplaces (labor marketplaces, and marketplaces for goods), e-commerce businesses, other kinds of lenders, and any business that might want to incorporate transactions or new financial services into their wider offerings. Shtilman said that at the moment, Rapyd is seeing its strongest growth yet, onboarding about 500 new customers each week.

The funding is coming at a $2.5 billion post-money valuation, Shtilman confirmed. (For some context on that, Rapyd was last valued at $1.2 billion in December 2019.)

The round is a Series D and is being led by prolific growth-round VC Coatue, with Spark Capital, Avid Ventures, FJ Labs, and Latitude (all new backers) and General Catalyst, Oak FT, Tiger Global, Target Global, Durable Capital, Tal Capital, and Entrée Capital (all previous backers) also participating. Other past investors, notably, include another major player in the world of API-based financial services, Stripe.

As with other companies in categories that have seen a huge surge of demand in the last year, financial services — and in particular those providing services to be able to carry out transactions online via the internet or phone — have proven to be some of the most mandatory and most used. (And no wonder, since bills still need paying, food and other items still need to be purchased, loans very much still need to be made, and so on.)

Notably, this was what many call and “opportunistic” raise, made not to keep the lights on or to extend runway, but because they money was being offered at good terms, and there were smart places where it could be put to use to grow the business.

“We didn’t plan to raise money when we raised this round, but when the pandemic came in our business started to boom,” Shtilman said. “We were approached by existing investors to scale beyond our original business plans after we completed our 2021 growth plans in three months in 2020. So we thought the timing was probably right for world domination.”

Shtilman was partly (only partly) joking — he has a sort of deadpan delivery that I can’t quite capture here — but it’s a far cry from the startup’s early days, when “no one wanted to invest because everyone thought it would be too hard to execute. Even our early investors advised us to focus on a smaller concept. But we thought building globally doesn’t work to start small it’s against the idea. Over the last several years the need to explain and what we do almost vanished.”

The challenge (and opportunity) that Rapyd identified back in 2017 when it first opened for business is that the global commerce and financial markets are very highly fragmented: consumers and businesses in individual markets have their own preferred payment methods and demands, regulations differ, and the key companies involved vary from country to country.

Meanwhile, APIs have long been a great instrument for integration and connection: using a few lines of code — and presuming your own services are built on code too — you can knit together services, and bring in commoditized functionality that would take ages to build from the ground up, cutting down the effort and work needed, to focus on making your core business more unique.

While companies like Stripe, Twilio and many others had identified the opportunity of leveraging APIs to scale out a world of functionality to a wider set of would-be customers, what Rapyd really identified and built out was the idea of loading not just one, two, or three services, but hundreds (even thousands) of features into that proposition. The idea is smart and, as Shtilman noted, very much in keeping with the economies of scale that exist in e-commerce and fintech: individual transactions are at the end of the day very incremental, so services that bring many together can finally start to conceive of interesting returns.

That, of course, is not just something Rapyd has identified and run with. That is to say, the company has a number of competitors now in the market. Just last week, Germany-based Mambu, which also provides an API-based suite of services (7,000 at last count) under the idea of “banking as a service” raised $135 million at a valuation of over $2 billion. Stripe, a backer of Rapyd, also has continued to expand and add in a number of services well beyond payments. Thought Machine also raised a big round last year; Temenos and Italy’s Edera are also strong players here. And the field has so much opportunity that it’s even attracting a lot of newer entrants: witness Unit, another interesting player that came out of stealth in the U.S. in December with an interesting list of backers of its own.

“To build infrastructure doesn’t matter whether you are small mom and pop or something bigger, you need many things, and if you want to sell in more the one jurisdiction you need a lot of those services,” Shtilman noted about the need for scale and breadth in a fintech platform proposition. He’s also very sanguine about competition. “They have emerged like mushrooms after the rain. But if you don’t have competition it means you don’t have a business so this is good. It means there is a lot of demand. But for now we are the market leader. We think we will become the AWS of this space.”

That’s where investors like Coatue are also landing for now.

“The payment landscape varies dramatically across countries. A company doing business globally might need to accept hundreds of local payment methods. Rapyd’s API, which abstracts away this complexity, is currently powering what we think are many of the world’s most exciting companies,” said Kris Fredrickson, Managing Partner at Coatue, in a statement. “We are honored to partner with Arik and team for the next phase of the Rapyd journey.”