Monthly Archives: January 2021

News: Robinhood restricts trading in GameStop after retail brouhaha shakes markets

• January 28, 2021
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Update: Robinhood has made public note of the changes, stating that “in light of recent volatility” it is “restricting transactions for certain securities to position closing only, including $AMC, $BB, $BBBY, $EXPR, $GME, $KOSS, $NAKD and $NOK.” The company added that it has “raised margin requirements for certain securities.” Robinhood, the popular consumer trading application,

Update: Robinhood has made public note of the changes, stating that “in light of recent volatility” it is “restricting transactions for certain securities to position closing only, including $AMC, $BB, $BBBY, $EXPR, $GME, $KOSS, $NAKD and $NOK.” The company added that it has “raised margin requirements for certain securities.”

Robinhood, the popular consumer trading application, has restricted its users from making some popular investments and wagers, public reports indicate. Social media is awash with notes from individual Robinhood users indicating that some popular securities are now untradable, and the company reportedly sent out a note yesterday saying that it is “implementing certain restrictions for for GME [GameStop] and AMC [the theater chain] options trading.”

TechCrunch has multiple emails in to the company asking for clarification regarding what trades, and securities are banned in aggregate, and the reasoning behind the move, but we’ve yet to hear back at time of publication. User commentary thus far concerning Robinhood’s choice has been swift, and negative, however.

Robinhood’s decision comes after zero-cost trading platforms found themselves at the center of one of the public market’s more bizarre sagas, in which a horde of retail investors bid shares of heavily-shorted securities higher in an attempt to break the trades of professional investors; precisely who is making the bets, and what portion of the new wagers are from individual investors and not larger pools of capital following the trade is not clear.

Yesterday, after noting that some traditional online brokers had restricted some user access to certain securities, citing their volatility, TechCrunch asked Robinhood and a number of its peers if they were taking similar precautions.

One of the group added some protection, but most cited their focus on long-term shareholding over day trading; a fair position but one at odds with the fact that most free-trading apps generate revenue from consumer trade volume. And options and other more exotic trades generate more revenue for neo-brokers than trades executed in well-known stocks.

Robinhood’s latest move, then, will ding its revenues as it is no longer allowing for trading in some very popular securities and other market-based wagers.

This is not the first time that neo-brokers have come up against tension between their business model and user access to exotic investments. After a Robinhood user committed suicide after trading options and not understanding one of their trades, a tragedy, Robinhood worked to make options trading harder to get into. That was definitely the right call, but likely not great for its revenue in the short-term, we imagine, given how lucrative those trades have historically proven for the company.

Options volume is setting records. Trading volume is at historical highs. And at the time of writing, shares of GameStop are set to rally at the open yet again today. Let’s see what happens.

News: Qualtrics prices IPO at $30 per share, above its upgraded target range

• January 28, 2021
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Last night, Qualtrics priced its IPO at $30 per share, selling 50.4 million shares in the process. Notably, the company’s IPO price was harder to chase down than usual, with a formal press release in scarce supply. SEC filings indicate that the company “anticipate[s]” a price of $30 per share, and reports from media and

Last night, Qualtrics priced its IPO at $30 per share, selling 50.4 million shares in the process.

Notably, the company’s IPO price was harder to chase down than usual, with a formal press release in scarce supply. SEC filings indicate that the company “anticipate[s]” a price of $30 per share, and reports from media and IPO-watching entities cite the $30 figure as well.

TechCrunch has an email into the Qualtrics team asking to confirm the reports, which are sufficiently widespread and confident that we’re similarly comfortable with its final price.

At $30 per share, Qualtrics priced its IPO at $1 per share above its raised IPO range of $27 to $29 a share. TechCrunch anticipated that the company’s first IPO price interval was low; and this publication noted that we would not “fall over in shock if Qualtrics priced a dollar or two above [its] raised range.”

Quelle surprise.

At $30 per share, and with 511,138,997 shares outstanding after its debut per its most recent S-1/A, inclusive of its underwriters’ option, Qualtrics would be worth $15.3 billion. That’s just under double the $8 billion that the company was worth when it sold to SAP a few years ago. Of course, let’s wait until we get a formal, final share count before we lock in the company’s pre-trading value.

For SAP, then, the deal is a win. But it’s not alone in enjoying quick returns on Qualtrics. Silver Lake agreed to buy “15,018,484 shares at $21.64 per share” and “225 million of shares at the initial public offering price” back in December. So that means that the company has a paper gain of more than $125 million on the shares it bought for just under $22 apiece.

Not a bad trade. If Qualtrics’ gains in early trading, Silver Lake will do even better.

TechCrunch is talking to the company later today, and will have more notes on its performance and valuation when it begins to trade.

News: UCLA is building a digital archive of mass incarceration with a new $3.6M grant

• January 28, 2021
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UCLA researchers have been awarded a $3.65 million grant to collect, contextualize, and digitally preserve a huge archive of materials relating to policing and mass incarceration. It should help historians and anthropologists, but more fundamentally it will thoroughly document a period that many would rather forget. The “Archiving the Age of Mass incarceration” effort is

UCLA researchers have been awarded a $3.65 million grant to collect, contextualize, and digitally preserve a huge archive of materials relating to policing and mass incarceration. It should help historians and anthropologists, but more fundamentally it will thoroughly document a period that many would rather forget.

The “Archiving the Age of Mass incarceration” effort is being led by Kelly Lytle Hernandez, director of the university’s Bunche Center for African American Studies and creator of Million Dollar Hoods, another project documenting the human cost of incarceration in Los Angeles. The grant is provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.

“We may be at a turning point in American history — may be building something new,” Lytle Hernandez told me, citing a tumultuous but potentially transformative 2020. “If that’s the case we want to make sure we are preserving the record of what happened. What we want to do is retain the records, the memory, the experiences of people affected by mass incarceration, and where possible the records of the state, which would otherwise be destroyed.”

The core of this collection will be a cache of documents released to Lytle Hernandez by the LAPD as part of this 2019 settlement (shortly after she won a MacArthur fellowship) regarding public disclosures and communication. She described it as around 177 boxes of paper records from the 1980s to the early 2000s detailing the “war on drugs,” policing immigrants, and many other topics, with more to be provided later under an agreement with the department.

The idea would be to “counterbalance” these official documents, as she put it, with documentation and testimony from the other side of the equation.

“People who are disproportionately incarcerated or arrested — we often lose our records because we get evicted; because where we stored our records, we can’t make the payments and they’re seized; they’re seized when we’re arrested, etc.,” she explained. “If we need to undo generations of harm, we need to know, where did that harm happen? Who did it happen to? I see this archival project as part of that dismantlement effort.”

Over the next few years Lytle Hernandez will lead the effort to assemble the archive, which will involve such traditional work as scanning and indexing paper documents, but also visiting communities and collecting “carceral ephemera” such as receipts for bail bonds (which may be the only surviving record of a person’s brush with the justice system) and personal stories and media.

Getting records from police and state agencies is a difficult and sometimes legally or politically fraught process. It’s important to get as much information as possible, from as many sources as possible, as quickly as possible, she said. Other major turning points in the history of racial justice have been inadequately documented, for reasons both negligent and deliberate.

“What if the nation had sent out squads of oral historians and students to capture and preserve the record? Imagine what we could know about enslavement and its toll on all of us, what it meant to the making of this country, if we had talked to the people who had experienced it — what kind of archive that would have left us, to grapple with and to help us move away from its legacies,” said Lytle Hernandez. “But we’ve been able to forget the power and legacy of slavery because we didn’t do a good enough job. Same with native removal, internment, immigration.”

Now there is an opportunity — around the country, she was careful to point out, not just in LA — to do just that with the era of mass incarceration. Not only that but they can bring modern techniques to bear in ways that weren’t possible during, say, the Civil Rights movement.

Her experience with Million Dollar Hood has shown her that there is serious interest in turning the tables among communities that have historically been disenfranchised or targeted by racist and classist policies propped up by bogus data.

“When we have a meeting we have black and brown students crammed into the room and out into the hall to learn data analysis and data science,” she said. “Part of the project is opening up that door. When you bring the people into the room who are the most impacted, they see that data differently — they see different stories.”

The archive will be completely public, though the exact scope of what documents will be included and how they will be sorted, described, and so on is still being worked out. Regardless of the exact details, the archive should prove invaluable to students, researchers, and a curious public over the coming decades as the changes Lytle Hernandez hopes for begin to get underway.

News: Fetch’s latest warehouse robot is designed to replace forklifts

• January 28, 2021
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San Jose-based robotics company Fetch unveiled its latest robot this morning. The PalletTransport1500 is an autonomous bot designed specifically to replace forklift uses in warehouses. The systems, which are designed to pick up and delivery pallets, are capable of sporting payloads of up to 2,504 pounds. The device joins a number of different robotic forklift

San Jose-based robotics company Fetch unveiled its latest robot this morning. The PalletTransport1500 is an autonomous bot designed specifically to replace forklift uses in warehouses. The systems, which are designed to pick up and delivery pallets, are capable of sporting payloads of up to 2,504 pounds.

The device joins a number of different robotic forklift solutions from various companies, including Toyota. Though Amazon’s own Kiva Systems-produced robots are likely still the best-known pallet moving robotics in the game.

The system was developed with Honeywell’s Intelligrated’s Momentum warehouse software. Fetch, of course, already offers a number of different warehouse robotic solutions, building out a kind of autonomous ecosystem. The company’s systems are notable for their relative flexibility over other full-scale solutions.

Per a press release, the new robot is designed to remove humans from the pallet-moving equation. Actions include,

• Cross-docking: the AMR can transport pallets directly from inbound to outbound shipment areas. After pallets are unloaded from the truck, the AMR carries pallets routed from the inbound trailers/containers directly to the respective outbound shipping area location.

• Returns: once inbound items are sorted based on product type or vendor, the AMR transports pallets to their appropriate return station (inventory, recycle, charity, etc.)

• Warehouse transport: after received products are unloaded and palletized, the AMR moves inventory to storage locations based on business needs

This product category was no doubt one of its most highly demanded, given the fairly common occurance of forklift-related accidents. Per numbers from OSHA, “forklifts cause about 85 fatal accidents per year; 34,900 accidents result in serious injury; and 61,800 are classified as non-serious.” That’s a pretty big source of workplace accidents. The agency adds if you assign one accident per machine, that means somewhere in the neighborhood or 11% of U.S. forklifts are involved in an accident.

In addition to these concerns, COVID-19 related shutdowns have no doubt made the move toward automated fulfillment systems all the more compelling over the past year.

News: Location broker X-Mode continues to track users despite app store bans

• January 28, 2021
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Apple and Google banned apps from sharing users’ location data with X-Mode, a data broker with links to U.S. military contractors.

Privacy researchers say hundreds of Android apps, far more than previously disclosed, have sent granular user location data to X-Mode, a data broker known to sell location data to U.S. military contractors.

The apps include messaging apps, a free video and file converter, several dating sites, and religion and prayer apps — each accounting for tens of millions of downloads to date.

Sean O’Brien, principal researcher at ExpressVPN Digital Security Lab, and Esther Onfroy, co-founder of the Defensive Lab Agency, found close to 200 Android apps that at some point over the past year contained X-Mode tracking code.

Some of the apps were still sending location data to X-Mode as recently as December when Apple and Google told developers to remove X-Mode from their apps or face a ban from the app stores.

But weeks after the ban took effect, one popular U.S. transit map app that had been installed hundreds of thousands of times was still downloadable from Google Play even though it was still sending location data to X-Mode.

The new research, now published, is believed to be the broadest review to date of apps that collaborate with X-Mode, one of dozens of companies in a multibillion-dollar industry that buys and sells access to the location data collected from ordinary phone apps, often for the purposes of serving targeted advertising.

But X-Mode has faced greater scrutiny for its connections to government work, amid fresh reports that U.S. intelligence bought access to commercial location data to search for Americans’ past movements without first obtaining a warrant.

X-Mode pays app developers to include its tracking code, known as a software development kit, or SDK, in exchange for collecting and handing over the user’s location data. Users opt-in to this tracking by accepting the app’s terms of use and privacy policies. But not all apps that use X-Mode disclose to their users that their location data may end up with the data broker or is sold to military contractors.

X-Mode’s ties to military contractors (and by extension the U.S. military) was first disclosed by Motherboard, which first reported that a popular prayer app with more than 98 million downloads worldwide sent granular movement data to X-Mode.

In November, Motherboard found that another previously unreported Muslim prayer app called Qibla Compass sent data to X-Mode. O’Brien’s findings corroborate that and also point to several more Muslim-focused apps as containing X-Mode. By conducting network traffic analysis, Motherboard verified that at least three of those apps did at some point send location data to X-Mode, although none of the versions currently on Google Play do so. You can read Motherboard’s full story here.

X-Mode’s chief executive Josh Anton told CNN last year that the data broker tracks 25 million devices in the U.S., and told Motherboard its SDK had been used in about 400 apps.

In a statement to TechCrunch, Anton said:

“The ban on X-Mode’s SDK has broader ecosystem implications considering X-Mode collected similar mobile app data as most advertising SDKs. Apple and Google have set the precedent that they can determine private enterprises’ ability to collect and use mobile app data even when a majority of our publishers had secondary consent for the collection and use of location data.

We’ve recently sent a letter to Apple and Google to understand how we can best resolve this issue together so that we can both continue to use location data to save lives and continue to power the tech communities’ ability to build location-based products. We believe it’s important to ensure that Apple and Google hold X-Mode to the same standard they hold upon themselves when it comes to the collection and use of location data.”

The researchers also published new endpoints that apps using X-Mode’s SDK are known to communicate with, which O’Brien said he hoped would help others discover which apps are sending — or have historically sent — users’ location data to X-Mode.

“We hope consumers can identify if they’re the target of one of these location trackers and, more importantly, demand that this spying end. We want researchers to build off of our findings in the public interest, helping to shine light on these threats to privacy, security, and rights,” said O’Brien.

TechCrunch analyzed the network traffic on about two-dozen of the most downloaded Android apps in the researchers’ findings to look for apps that were communicating with any of the known X-Mode endpoints, and confirmed that several of the apps were at some point sending location data to X-Mode.

We also used the endpoints identified by the researchers to look for other popular apps that may have communicated with X-Mode.

At least one app identified by TechCrunch slipped through Google’s app store ban.

New York Subway, a popular app for navigating the New York City subway system that has been downloaded 250,000 times, according to data provided by Sensor Tower, was still listed in Google Play as of this week. But the app, which had not been updated since the app store bans were implemented, was still sending location data to X-Mode.

As soon as the app loads, a splash screen immediately asks for the user’s consent to send data to X-Mode for ads, analytics and market research, but the app did not mention X-Mode’s government work.

Desoline, the Israel-based app maker, did not respond to multiple requests for comment, but removed references to X-Mode from its privacy policy a short while after we reached out. At the time of writing, the app has not returned to Google Play.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the company removed the app from Google Play.

Using the researchers’ list of apps, TechCrunch also found that previous versions of two highly popular apps, Moco and Video MP3 Converter, which account for more than 115 million downloads to date, are still sending user location data to X-Mode. That poses a privacy risk to users who install Android apps from outside Google Play, and those who are running older apps that are still sending data to X-Mode.

Neither app maker responded to a request for comment. Google would not say if it had removed any other apps for similar violations or what measures it would take, if any, to protect users running older app versions that are still sending location data to X-Mode.

None of the corresponding and namesake apps for Apple’s iOS that we tested appeared to communicate with X-Mode’s endpoints. When reached, Apple declined to say if it had blocked any apps after its ban went into effect.

“The sensors in smartphones provide rich data that can be exploited to limit our movements, our free expression, and our autonomy,” said O’Brien. “Location spying poses a serious threat to human rights because it peers into the most sensitive aspects of our lives and who we associate with.”

The newly published research is likely to bring fresh scrutiny to how ordinary smartphone apps are harvesting and selling vast amounts of personal data on millions of Americans, often without the user’s explicit consent.

Several federal agencies, including the Internal Revenue Service and Homeland Security, are under investigation by government watchdogs for buying and using location data from various data brokers without first obtaining a warrant. Last week it emerged that intelligence analysts at the Defense Intelligence Agency buy access to commercial databases of Americans’ location data.

Critics say the government is exploiting a loophole in a 2018 Supreme Court ruling, which stopped law enforcement from obtaining cell phone location data directly from the cell carriers without a warrant.

Now the government says it doesn’t believe it needs a warrant for what it can buy directly from brokers.

Sen. Ron Wyden, a vocal privacy critic whose office has been investigating the data broker industry, previously drafted legislation that would grant the Federal Trade Commission new powers to regulate and fine data brokers.

“Americans are sick of learning that their location data is being sold by data brokers to anyone with a credit card. Industry self-regulation clearly isn’t working — Congress needs to pass tough legislation, like my Mind Your Own Business Act, to give consumers effective tools to prevent their data being sold and to give the FTC the power to hold companies accountable when they violate Americans’ privacy,” said Wyden.

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News: Online wholesale retailer Boxed taps Aeon for Asia expansion

• January 28, 2021
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Boxed, the New York-based online retailer that sells and delivers bulk-sized groceries, makes its foray into Asia by partnering with Aeon, one of Asia’s largest brick-and-mortar retail operators. Unlike its consumer-focused business in the U.S., which has been described as “Costco for millennials,” Boxed is exporting its nascent software-as-a-service solution to Aeon in Malaysia. As

Boxed, the New York-based online retailer that sells and delivers bulk-sized groceries, makes its foray into Asia by partnering with Aeon, one of Asia’s largest brick-and-mortar retail operators.

Unlike its consumer-focused business in the U.S., which has been described as “Costco for millennials,” Boxed is exporting its nascent software-as-a-service solution to Aeon in Malaysia. As part of the tie-up, the American startup will create an end-to-end e-commerce solution to aid Aeon’s digital transformation, which includes a storefront platform and inventory-picking software. Boxed declined to disclose the value of the deal but said it’s in the “several tens of millions of dollars.”

Malaysia, which is home to more than 30 million people, is Boxed’s first stop in Asia and Aeon’s biggest market outside its home base of Japan. Aeon employs some 10,000 staff in Malaysia, where it has pledged to spur local employment amid the pandemic through its virtual mall.

With Boxed’s technology, Aeon customers will have the flexibility to pick their chosen number of items and have them shipped in a box to their doorstep. Boxed doesn’t intend to provide last-mile delivery in Asia but will instead tap local courier services. Grab, for instance, is a potential partner, Boxed co-founder and CEO Chieh Huang told TechCrunch in an interview.

Foray into Asia

Through a mutual friend, Huang got in touch with Aeon, which was established 263 years ago in Japan and today operates 21,000 locations, from clothing chains, convenience stores to general merchandise stores, across 14 countries.

Working with Aeon was challenging at first, Huang said, as there were differences not only in time zones but also in cultural norms due to Aeon’s colossal size. It took numerous in-person meetings and international calls to eventually bridge the gap.

The partners are also exploring opportunities to work together in other Southeast Asian markets. Boxed will keep its enterprise-facing angle by licensing software to local retailers rather than expanding its consumer business to the region, which is already crowded with established e-commerce players like Shopee, Lazada and Tokopedia.

Digitizing traditional retailers

Prior to the SaaS deal, Aeon was already an investor in Boxed. In 2018, it led the e-commerce startup’s $111 billion Series D funding round so it could tap Boxed’s intel in retail digitization. Huang believed his company was chosen because it was one of the few e-commerce operators alongside JD.com and Amazon that have full control over the supply chain and users’ purchasing experience.

Boxed builds its own warehouse robots as well because “we are able to do it much cheaper ourselves than buying the robots,” argued Huang. “Most of the robots are very advanced because they are not able to control the environment. We own the fulfillment center so we can delete a lot of the things that are expensive, such as Lidar.”

Furthermore, the startup’s “box” model helps flat out the costs of shipping with each incremental item delivered, giving the platform a price advantage, the founder said.

Future of Boxed

Founded in 2013, Boxed has accumulated over seven million registered users. With a staff of 500 employees across the U.S., it’s now generating hundreds of millions of dollars in annual revenue.

In all, Boxed has raised over $270 million. Since its last financing round in 2018, the company has had little publicity. During that time Boxed was focused on fine-tuning its retail software solution, which has become its second and more profitable line of business. The firm’s margin is improving every year and getting close to profitability in 2021, said Huang. And like other e-commerce companies, Boxed saw growth in user demand through the pandemic.

Going public is “always on our mind,” said Huang. “I think it will surprise a lot of people how close we are to profitability.”

Reuters reported in September that Boxed was weighing up “a sale or going public through a merger with a blank-check acquisition company that could value it at around $1 billion.” To that, the startup gave a somewhat indefinite response:

“As a result of the shift to online, we’ve also seen increased demand from many parties looking to partner with us to accelerate growth both in our marketplace and new SaaS business. We are thoughtfully considering these options when it comes to the long-term success of Boxed.”

News: Tecera launches with $225M to fund cloud consulting firms

• January 28, 2021
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As we move deeper into a cloud-centric world, everything was supposed to get easier, but in truth there’s a lot of moving parts, and companies need help getting everything to work. This takes people with a particular set of skills to help clients with tasks like integrations, managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments and getting data

As we move deeper into a cloud-centric world, everything was supposed to get easier, but in truth there’s a lot of moving parts, and companies need help getting everything to work. This takes people with a particular set of skills to help clients with tasks like integrations, managing hybrid and multi-cloud environments and getting data where you need it.

Tecera, a new venture capital firm launching today wants to attack this problem by investing in companies that can act as helpers and consultants. In a world where venture capital tends to gravitate mostly towards software and hardware, this is a distinctly different investment thesis.

Chris Barbin, founder and CEO at Tecera knows quite a bit about this. He was one of the founders at Appirio, a consulting firm founded way back in 2006 when cloud computing as we know it today was just getting off the ground. His former company had the vision and the foresight to start a firm to help companies use new tools like Salesforce, Google, Workday and AWS. Wipro bought the company in 2016 for $500 million after it had raised over $117 million, according to Crunchbase data.

Barbin believes that today, the level of complexity has only increased, and there will be a growing need for what he calls this people power to make everything work, and that takes a specialized kind of investor. “There’s been a flurry of investment activity into professional services-based companies over the last couple of years, but there’s never been an investment firm that is exclusively focused on these types of businesses,” Barbin explained.

During the firm’s research phase, the founders identified key platform companies like Salesforce, Twilio, Snowflake, DataDog and Cloudflare, and they estimate that there are between 7500 and 10,000 consulting companies supporting companies like this. “The goal of the firm is to help create a kind of a powerhouse for those emerging [platforms], or a firm or two that actually has the collection of those [SaaS platforms] in their toolkit,” he said.

The company will be targeting established firms with revenue between $5 and $20 million with aspirations to grow into the hundreds of millions, and will be doling out investments of between $5 and 20 million of capital per bet.

The firm is just getting started, but plans to have 8 employees by mid-year. Barbin indicated at least one investment was already in the pipeline, but wasn’t ready to give details just yet.

News: Heights raises $2M for its subscription supplements aimed new ‘braincare’ category

• January 28, 2021
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New wellness startup Heights is formally launching this week, focusing on a category it describes as ‘braincare’. The startup will market “ultra high quality, sustainable plant-based supplements that feed your brain” based on what it says is scientific data. It has raised a $2 million Seed funding round (£1.7M) via the Seedrs crowdfunding platform, with the

New wellness startup Heights is formally launching this week, focusing on a category it describes as ‘braincare’. The startup will market “ultra high quality, sustainable plant-based supplements that feed your brain” based on what it says is scientific data.

It has raised a $2 million Seed funding round (£1.7M) via the Seedrs crowdfunding platform, with the round also including the institutional investor Forward Partners. Angel investors include Tom Singh (founder of New Look), Damian Bradfield (WeTransfer), Dhiraj Mukherjee (Shazam), Renee Elliot (Planet Organic), and celebrity investor Chris Smalling (an England and Manchester United professional footballer).

The funds will be used for customer growth and new product development, including soon-to-launch a ‘psychobiotic‘ probiotic aimed at cognition and mental health.

Customers first take a ‘brain health’ survey, then sign up for a monthly, quarterly, or annual subscription.

Customers need only take two capsules a day, thus hugely decreasing the complexity of juggling regular vitamin taking.

The product fits through a letterbox and the unusual bottle was designed by the well-known product design agency Pentagram. A content and coaching program included in the subscription helps customers, and another brain health survey happens after a month. Heights claims that “93%” improve their brain health score within one month.

Heights is not alone in this new market for what some describe as ‘designer vitamins’ and the arena is already populated by the likes of Hims / Hers, Motion, Vitabiotics and Bulletproof.

These companies broadly fall into the “Nootropics” category — vitamins and minerals designed to improve cognitive function, memory, creativity, or motivation, in healthy individuals. But the market is not small. The ‘self care’, ‘healthcare’, and ‘personal development’ market is worth over $1Trillion but supplements alone is worth at least $100BN+.

However, co-founder Dan Murray-Serter says Heights is aiming to do something different to the aforementioned players.

In a text-based interview, he said: “Nootropics as a category really focus on quick fixes, which is why we’re working on the category creation of ‘braincare’ because there are no ‘quick fixes’ in life, and that terminology and category have essentially set people up with the same false hopes as ‘get-rich-quick’ schemes do. We’re set up differently — aka, starting with scientifically researched articles and journal references.”

He said Heights will be positioned more like a skincare or haircare brand, “because people understand that the daily habit/practice is what creates the longevity and impact, not just a one-day miracle.”

Murray-Serter says there are 20 key nutrients science says our brains need to thrive, and these are mostly found in a combination of buying multivitamins, omega 3s, and ‘nootropics’. He says Heights has sourced the “highest quality” ingredients in the most ‘bioavailable form’ in a patented capsule which makes it easier to digest for the body.

“One of the most common reasons the habit of taking vitamins doesn’t stick for people is that the bottle goes into a cupboard and gets ignored. So we started with design alongside quality,” he says. The Heights vitamins come in a distinctive, recyclable bottle which Heights will also aven recycle if you send it back to them.

Murray-Serter, who previously founded the mobile startup Grabble, says he came up with the idea for the startup after a bout of chronic anxiety and a 6 month-long period of insomnia. The problem was solved by high-quality, high-density vitamins and supplements, as opposed to normal supplements which usually only have the lowest recommended daily levels of vitamins inside them.

After starting a newsletter on the subject of optimizing cognitive performance with cofounder Joel Freeman, the pair amassed a following of 60,000 readers www.yourheights.com/sundays

and then came up with the idea of launching the actual product.

The company now has a ‘Braincare‘ podcast that has reached 100,000 downloads, and the founders have also been joined by key team member Chief Science Officer, Dr Tara Swart (pictured).

Two things may help Heights. Firstly, in the era of Covid-19, public health authorities and governments around the world have recommended taking Vitamin D to boost the body’s immune system should someone fall prey to the disease. It’s not insignificant that two Heights capsules contain 400% of the ‘Nutrient Reference Value’ (formerly known as Recommended Daily Allowance) of Vitamin D3, as well as many other supplements. Theoretically, one could take four normal tablets of this, but the customer experience and other added vitamins in Heights will appeal to many. Secondly, the growing awareness of mental health and interest in maintaining good mental health is now a regular subject of public discourse. So Heights appears to be well-positioned to ride both those waves.

News: Fintech darling Nubank raises blockbuster $400M Series G at $25B valuation

• January 28, 2021
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While the pandemic has left some startups strapped for cash, the aptly-named Brazilian neobank Nubank is swimming in it. This morning, the company announced that it has raised a $400 million Series G round, putting their total funding to date at $1.2 billion. But even more remarkable, in addition to their new $25 billion valuation (up from

While the pandemic has left some startups strapped for cash, the aptly-named Brazilian neobank Nubank is swimming in it. This morning, the company announced that it has raised a $400 million Series G round, putting their total funding to date at $1.2 billion. But even more remarkable, in addition to their new $25 billion valuation (up from $10 billion in 2019), is their customer base of 34 million users, which they’ve built up since the fintech’s launch in 2013.

“We’ve gone from 12 million customers in 2019 to 34 million solely based on word of mouth,” said David Velez, the company’s co-founder and CEO. By September last year, the company was onboarding 41,000 new customers per day. NuBank prides itself on having a $0 customer acquisition cost. Velez said the startup spends what would be marketing money on “great salaries” and superior customer service, which in turn creates “fanatic” customers who share their love for the brand with others.

The new valuation places NuBank as the fourth most valuable financial institution in Latin America and the largest digital bank in the world by the number of customers and app downloads. 

The round was led by both private and public investors including Singapore’s GIC, Whale Rock, and Invesco. Current investors Tencent, Dragoneer, Ribbit Capital, and Sequoia also participated in the round. Velez is a former Sequoia partner and is originally from Colombia though he attended Stanford University and worked in the U.S. for many years.

NuBank, based in São Paulo — the financial capital of Latin America and home to 12.8 million people — has expanded to Colombia and Mexico and plans to use the new funding to flesh out its operations in those markets while continuing to build out its product offerings in Brazil.

What started as a credit card company now functions as a full-service bank, minus the cumbersome bank branches, which is one way the company has been able to allocate its funding primarily toward growth.

“People were really done with being mistreated and paying high fees,” said Velez, speaking to Brazil’s notoriously bureaucratic and dreadful banking experience (liken it to going to the DMV, but regularly). Historically, to pay your monthly bills in Brazil, you had to go to a bank branch and wait in line — often outside in the heat — until it was your turn. The lines wrapped around the block like that of an Apple Store upon the release of the latest iPhone.

“It’s like they are doing you a favor by opening an account for you and then charging you 450% interest rate per year,” said Velez. “Our bet was that people would really like to be treated like humans,” he added.

In 1994, when the Brazilian real currency was introduced, it was pegged at 1:1 with the U.S. dollar. However, in recent years, with the country’s largest corruption scandal in history which saw three consecutive presidents jailed, impeached, and incriminated, respectively, the economy has plummeted. And COVID-19 certainly hasn’t helped. The exchange rate is now 1 USD to 5.40 BRL. With low exchange rates in Brazil, Colombia, and Mexico, a $400 million USD investment creates a sizable runway, especially since Nubank’s Brazil operation has been cash-flow positive since 2018.

The company is known for reaching the unbanked population in Brazil, especially those who simply weren’t in the financial position to get a credit card. Traditional banks are present in about 80% of Brazilian municipalities, but considering that Nubank’s app-based product is location-agnostic, it’s able to reach 100% of the municipalities, the company said. In addition, it’s been helping Brazilians build credit. Its Barney-purple credit card starts at a monthly limit of $50 reals per month (roughly $10 USD). If a customer pays on time the first month, their credit continues to increase over the following months. 

Amongst its slew of products, Nubank also offers a debit card and savings account, and while it doesn’t have branches of its own, money can be withdrawn from network ATM’s, as is common in the U.S.

“Nubank was born out of the conviction that people deserved better, more transparent and human financial services that would allow them to be in control of their money and their future. We started seven years ago in Brazil, a country with one of the most concentrated banking sectors in the world, and we were able to free millions of people of the bureaucracy and the pain. Through technology and human customer service, we were able to have a positive impact on their daily lives,” said Velez.

News: UK’s competition watchdog still eyeing Facebook’s Giphy buy

• January 28, 2021
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The UK’s competition regulator will make a decision on whether or not Facebook’s purchase of Giphy has a ‘realistic prospect’ of substantially lessening competition by March 25, it said today, as it continues to scrutinize the acquisition. “The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) hereby gives notice pursuant to paragraph (b) of the definition of ‘initial

The UK’s competition regulator will make a decision on whether or not Facebook’s purchase of Giphy has a ‘realistic prospect’ of substantially lessening competition by March 25, it said today, as it continues to scrutinize the acquisition.

“The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) hereby gives notice pursuant to paragraph (b) of the definition of ‘initial period’ in section 34ZA(3) of the [Enterprise] Act that it has sufficient information in relation to the completed acquisition by Facebook, Inc of Giphy, Inc, (the Merger) to enable it to begin an investigation for the purposes of deciding whether to make a reference for a Phase 2 investigation,” it writes.

“The initial period defined in section 34ZA(3) of the Act in relation to the Merger will therefore commence on the first working day after the date of this notice, ie on 29 January 2021. The end of the initial period and the deadline for the CMA to announce its decision whether to refer the Merger for a Phase 2 investigation is therefore 25 March 2021.”

The Competition and Markets Authority launched a probe of Facebook’s $400M acquisition of the GIF-sharing platform back in June 2020.

The investigation put a freeze on Facebook’s ability to continue activities related to integrating Giphy into its wider business empire — such as integrating products or teams or working on business deals or contracts together — despite having already been completed the acquisition.

Facebook confirmed its plan to acquire Giphy in May 2020 — when it also announced its plan to integrate the platform into its photo and video sharing app, Instagram.

But those plans remain on ice as a result of competition scrutiny in the UK. (Last June Facebook and Giphy confirmed they were complying with the CMA’s order to pause integration activity.)

It’s another sign of the growing regulatory friction that tech giants are facing when they seek to grow via acquisition. Last year, for example, European regulators also spent months eyeing Google’s Fitbit acquisition — although they did finally clear the deal in December. But only after obtaining a number of commitments from the tech giant related to how Fitbit data could be used and rivals’ access to APIs.

In the Facebook-Giphy case, the UK watchdog will make a decision in March on whether to open a deeper and broader Phase 2 investigation (after which it would need to issue a final decision).

It could also decide at that point that there is no ‘realistic prospect’ of a substantial lessening of competition as a result of Facebook acquiring Giphy and conclude its intervene — lifting the bar on continued integration between the pair.

The regulator also has discretion to choose not to open a Phase 2 investigation for other reasons, such as if it believes the market is not of sufficient importance to justify the deeper dive or that benefits to customers from a merger outweigh any negative competitive effects.

Given the acquired business in this case is a platform for swapping reaction GIFs it certainly seems possible the CMA may decide that a deeper dive isn’t merited. But we’ll know more in a couple of months.

Whatever happens, regulatory concern linked to Facebook’s grip on the social web has already delayed its plans for Giphy by well over half a year — and the probe may yet drag on for longer — impacting its ability to move fast (and break things).