Monthly Archives: April 2021

News: Fraud prevention platform Sift raises $50M at over $1B valuation, eyes acquisitions

• April 22, 2021
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With the increase of digital transacting over the past year, cybercriminals have been having a field day. In 2020, complaints of suspected internet crime surged by 61%, to 791,790, according to the FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Report. Those crimes — ranging from personal and corporate data breaches to credit card fraud, phishing and identity theft

With the increase of digital transacting over the past year, cybercriminals have been having a field day.

In 2020, complaints of suspected internet crime surged by 61%, to 791,790, according to the FBI’s 2020 Internet Crime Report. Those crimes — ranging from personal and corporate data breaches to credit card fraud, phishing and identity theft — cost victims more than $4.2 billion.

For companies like Sift — which aims to predict and prevent fraud online even more quickly than cybercriminals adopt new tactics — that increase in crime also led to an increase in business.

Last year, the San Francisco-based company assessed risk on more than $250 billion in transactions, double from what it did in 2019. The company has over several hundred customers, including Twitter, Airbnb, Twilio, DoorDash, Wayfair and McDonald’s, as well a global data network of 70 billion events per month.

To meet the surge in demand, Sift said today it has raised $50 million in a funding round that values the company at over $1 billion. Insight Partners led the financing, which included participation from Union Square Ventures and Stripes.

While the company would not reveal hard revenue figures, President and CEO Marc Olesen said that business has tripled since he joined the company in June 2018. Sift was founded out of Y Combinator in 2011, and has raised a total of $157 million over its lifetime.

The company’s “Digital Trust & Safety” platform aims to help merchants not only fight all types of internet fraud and abuse, but to also “reduce friction” for legitimate customers. There’s a fine line apparently between looking out for a merchant and upsetting a customer who is legitimately trying to conduct a transaction.

Sift uses machine learning and artificial intelligence to automatically surmise whether an attempted transaction or interaction with a business online is authentic or potentially problematic.

Image Credits: Sift

One of the things the company has discovered is that fraudsters are often not working alone.

“Fraud vectors are no longer siloed. They are highly innovative and often working in concert,” Olesen said. “We’ve uncovered a number of fraud rings.”

Olesen shared a couple of examples of how the company thwarted fraud incidents last year. One recently involved money laundering through donation sites where fraudsters tested stolen debit and credit cards through fake donation sites at guest checkout.

“By making small donations to themselves, they laundered that money and at the same tested the validity of the stolen cards so they could use it on another site with significantly higher purchases,” he said. 

In another case, the company uncovered fraudsters using Telegram, a social media site, to make services available, such as food delivery, with stolen credentials.

The data that Sift has accumulated since its inception helps the company “act as the central nervous system for fraud teams.” Sift says that its models become more intelligent with every customer that it integrates.

Insight Partners Managing Director Jeff Lieberman, who is a Sift board member, said his firm initially invested in Sift in 2016 because even at that time, it was clear that online fraud was “rapidly growing.” It was growing not just in dollar amounts, he said, but in the number of methods cybercriminals used to steal from consumers and businesses.

“Sift has a novel approach to fighting fraud that combines massive data sets with machine learning, and it has a track record of proving its value for hundreds of online businesses,” he wrote via email.

When Olesen and the Sift team started the recent process of fundraising, Insight actually approached them before they started talking to outside investors “because both the product and business fundamentals are so strong, and the growth opportunity is massive,” Lieberman added.

“With more businesses heavily investing in online channels, nearly every one of them needs a solution that can intelligently weed out fraud while ensuring a seamless experience for the 99% of transactions or actions that are legitimate,” he wrote. 

The company plans to use its new capital primarily to expand its product portfolio and to scale its product, engineering and sales teams.

Sift also recently tapped Eu-Gene Sung — who has worked in financial leadership roles at Integral Ad Science, BSE Global and McCann — to serve as its CFO.

As to whether or not that meant an IPO is in Sift’s future, Olesen said that Sung’s experience of taking companies through a growth phase such as what Sift is experiencing would be valuable. The company is also for the first time looking to potentially do some M&A.

“When we think about expanding our portfolio, it’s really a buy/build partner approach,” Olesen said.

News: Google Fi turns 6 and gets a new unlimited plan

• April 22, 2021
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Google Fi, Google’s cell network, is turning six today and to celebrate, the team is launching a new pricing plan, dubbed “Simply Unlimited” starting at $60 per month for a single line (down to $30 per line for three lines or more). The new plan features unlimited calls and texts in the U.S., plus unlimited

Google Fi, Google’s cell network, is turning six today and to celebrate, the team is launching a new pricing plan, dubbed “Simply Unlimited” starting at $60 per month for a single line (down to $30 per line for three lines or more). The new plan features unlimited calls and texts in the U.S., plus unlimited data and texting in the U.S., Canada and Mexico.

Image Credits: Google

You may recall that Fi’s original promise was a single, affordable pay-as-you-go plan where you would pay a fixed price per month for the basic call and texting service and then pay an extra $10 per GB of data you used per billing cycle, capped at $80 per month. In 2019, Google then turned this into what is essentially an unlimited plan, dubbed Fi Unlimited, starting at $70 per month for a single line, with discounts for additional lines.

The new “Simply Unlimited” plan is a pared-down version of the original Unlimited plan, which is now called the Unlimited Plus plan (yeah, that’s a lot of names). Now, that plan has still a lot of extra features that power users aren’t likely willing to give up for a slightly lower price. In addition to everything in the new Simply Unlimited plan, this plan still features free international calls to more than 50 countries and international data in more than 200 destinations, plus full-speed hotspot tethering and 100 GB of Google One cloud storage.

The Flexible plan is also still an option, with its base fee of $20 per month for texting and calling for a single line (down to $17 per month for three lines) and $10 per GB of data, no matter whether you use if abroad or at home — or for hotspot tethering. Google says that’s the plan to choose if you’re mostly on WiFi — as most of us are right now.

Basically, if you’re not planning to use your phone outside of North America, the new Simply Unlimited plan looks like a good deal that, depending on your use case, compares favorably with similarly priced plans from other carriers — especially if international data is important to you.

Image Credits: Google

News: Alexa von Tobel will join Disrupt 2021 as a Startup Battlefield judge

• April 22, 2021
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Alexa von Tobel, co-founder and managing partner of Inspired Capital, will be joining TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 taking place September 21-23 to help judge the startups competing in Startup Battlefield. NOTE: Applications are now open to don’t hesitate to throw your hat in the ring here! Prior to Inspired Capital, Alexa founded LearnVest in 2008 with

Alexa von Tobel, co-founder and managing partner of Inspired Capital, will be joining TechCrunch Disrupt 2021 taking place September 21-23 to help judge the startups competing in Startup Battlefield. NOTE: Applications are now open to don’t hesitate to throw your hat in the ring here!

Prior to Inspired Capital, Alexa founded LearnVest in 2008 with the goal of helping women in particular make better investments and learn financial planning. After raising $75 million in venture capital and growing the service to 1.5 million users, LearnVest was acquired by Northwestern Mutual in May 2015 for $250 million.

Following the acquisition, Alexa joined the management team of Northwestern Mutual as the company’s first chief digital officer. She later assumed the role of chief innovation officer, a position in which which she oversaw Northwestern Mutual’s venture arm.

Alexa, who holds a Certified Financial Planner designation, is also The New York Times-bestselling author of “Financially Fearless,” which debuted in December 2013, and its follow-up, “Financially Forward,” which arrived in May 2019. She is also the host of “The Founders Project with Alexa von Tobel,” a weekly podcast with Inc. that highlights entrepreneurs.

Alexa is a member of the 2016 Class of Henry Crown Fellows and an inaugural member of President Obama’s Ambassadors for Global Entrepreneurship. She has been honored with numerous recognitions, including: a Forbes Magazine cover story, Fortune’s 40 Under 40, Fortune’s Most Powerful Women, Inc. Magazine’s 30 Under 30 and World Economic Forum’s Young Global Leader.

Alexa recently joined us at TechCrunch Early Stage, where she led a breakout session on financial planning targeted specifically at startups. Join us at Disrupt this September and get your ticket for under $100 for a limited time!

News: Proctorio sued for using DMCA to take down a student’s critical tweets

• April 22, 2021
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A university student is suing exam proctoring software maker Proctorio to “quash a campaign of harassment” against critics of the company, including an accusation that the company misused copyright laws to remove his tweets that were critical of the software. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the lawsuit this week on behalf of Miami University

A university student is suing exam proctoring software maker Proctorio to “quash a campaign of harassment” against critics of the company, including an accusation that the company misused copyright laws to remove his tweets that were critical of the software.

The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the lawsuit this week on behalf of Miami University student Erik Johnson, who also does security research on the side, accused Proctorio of having “exploited the DMCA to undermine Johnson’s commentary.”

Twitter hid three of Johnson’s tweets after Proctorio filed a copyright takedown notice under the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, or DMCA, alleging that three of Johnson’s tweets violated the company’s copyright.

Schools and universities have increasingly leaned on proctoring software during the pandemic to invigilate student exams, albeit virtually. Students must install the school’s choice of proctoring software to grant access to the student’s microphone and webcam to spot potential cheating. But students of color have complained that the software fails to recognize non-white faces and that the software also requires high-speed internet access, which many low-income houses don’t have. If a student fails these checks, the student can end up failing the exam.

Despite this, Vice reported last month that some students are easily cheating on exams that are monitored by Proctorio. Several schools have banned or discontinued using Proctorio and other proctoring software, citing privacy concerns.

Proctorio’s monitoring software is a Chrome extension, which unlike most desktop software can be easily downloaded and the source code examined for bugs and flaws. Johnson examined the code and tweeted what he found — including under what circumstances a student’s test would be terminated if the software detected signs of potential cheating, and how the software monitors for suspicious eye movements and abnormal mouse clicking.

Johnson’s tweets also contained links to snippets of the Chrome extension’s source code on Pastebin.

Proctorio claimed at the time, via its crisis communications firm Edelman, that Johnson violated the company’s rights “by copying and posting extracts from Proctorio’s software code on his Twitter account.” But Twitter reinstated Johnson’s tweets after finding Proctorio’s takedown notice “incomplete.”

“Software companies don’t get to abuse copyright law to undermine their critics,” said Cara Gagliano, a staff attorney at the EFF. “Using pieces [of] code to explain your research or support critical commentary is no different from quoting a book in a book review.”

The complaint argues that Proctorio’s “pattern of baseless DMCA notices” had a chilling effect on Johnson’s security research work, amid fears that “reporting on his findings will elicit more harassment.”

“Copyright holders should be held liable when they falsely accuse their critics of copyright infringement, especially when the goal is plainly to intimidate and undermine them,” said Gagliano. “We’re asking the court for a declaratory judgment that there is no infringement to prevent further legal threats and takedown attempts against Johnson for using code excerpts and screenshots to support his comments.”

The EFF alleges that this is part of a wider pattern that Proctorio uses to respond to criticism. Last year Olsen posted a student’s private chat logs on Reddit without their permission. Olsen later set his Twitter account to private following the incident. Proctorio is also suing Ian Linkletter, a learning technology specialist at the University of British Columbia, after posting tweets critical of the company’s proctoring software.

The lawsuit is filed in Arizona, where Proctorio is headquartered. Proctorio CEO Mike Olson did not respond to a request for comment.

News: To ensure inclusivity, the Biden administration must double down on AI development initiatives

• April 22, 2021
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The Biden administration must clarify current laws pertaining to AI and machine learning models — how we will evaluate use by private actors and how we will govern AI usage within our systems.

The National Security Commission on Artificial Intelligence (NSCAI) issued a report last month delivering an uncomfortable public message: America is not prepared to defend or compete in the AI era. It leads to two key questions that demand our immediate response: Will the U.S. continue to be a global superpower if it falls behind in AI development and deployment? And what can we do to change this trajectory?

Left unchecked, seemingly neutral artificial intelligence (AI) tools can and will perpetuate inequalities and, in effect, automate discrimination. Tech-enabled harms have already surfaced in credit decisions, health care services, and advertising.

To prevent this recurrence and growth at scale, the Biden administration must clarify current laws pertaining to AI and machine learning models — both in terms of how we will evaluate use by private actors and how we will govern AI usage within our government systems.

The administration has put a strong foot forward, from key appointments in the tech space to issuing an Executive Order on the first day in office that established an Equitable Data Working Group. This has comforted skeptics concerned both about the U.S. commitment to AI development and to ensuring equity in the digital space.

But that will be fleeting unless the administration shows strong resolve in making AI funding a reality and establishing leaders and structures necessary to safeguard its development and use.

Need for clarity on priorities

There has been a seismic shift at the federal level in AI policy and in stated commitments to equality in tech. A number of high profile appointments by the Biden administration — from Dr. Alondra Nelson as Deputy of OSTP, to Tim Wu at the NEC, to (our former senior advisor) Kurt Campbell at the NSC — signal that significant attention will be paid to inclusive AI development by experts on the inside.

The NSCAI final report includes recommendations that could prove critical to enabling better foundations for inclusive AI development, such as creating new talent pipelines through a U.S. Digital Service Academy to train current and future employees.

The report also recommends establishing a new Technology Competitiveness Council led by the Vice President. This could prove essential in ensuring that the nation’s commitment to AI leadership remains a priority at the highest levels. It makes good sense to have the administration’s leadership on AI spearheaded by VP Harris in light of her strategic partnership with the President, her tech policy savvy and her focus on civil rights.

The U.S. needs to lead by example

We know AI is powerful in its ability to create efficiencies, such as plowing through thousands of resumes to identify potentially suitable candidates. But it can also scale discrimination, such as the Amazon hiring tool that prioritized male candidates or “digital redlining” of credit based on race.

The Biden administration should issue an Executive Order (EO) to agencies inviting ideation on ways AI can improve government operations. The EO should also mandate checks on AI used by the USG to ensure it’s not spreading discriminatory outcomes unintentionally.

For instance, there must be a routine schedule in place where AI systems are evaluated to ensure embedded, harmful biases are not resulting in recommendations that are discriminatory or inconsistent with our democratic, inclusive values — and reevaluated routinely given that AI is constantly iterating and learning new patterns.

Putting a responsible AI governance system in place is particularly critical in the U.S. Government, which is required to offer due process protection when denying certain benefits. For instance, when AI is used to determine allocation of Medicaid benefits, and such benefits are modified or denied based on an algorithm, the government must be able to explain that outcome, aptly termed technological due process.

If decisions are delegated to automated systems without explainability, guidelines and human oversight, we find ourselves in the untenable situation where this basic constitutional right is being denied.

Likewise, the administration has immense power to ensure that AI safeguards by key corporate players are in place through its procurement power. Federal contract spending was expected to exceed $600 billion in fiscal 2020, even before including pandemic economic stimulus funds. The USG could effectuate tremendous impact by issuing a checklist for federal procurement of AI systems — this would ensure the government’s process is both rigorous and universally applied, including relevant civil rights considerations.

Protection from discrimination stemming from AI systems

The government holds another powerful lever to protect us from AI harms: its investigative and prosecutorial authority. An Executive Order instructing agencies to clarify applicability of current laws and regulations (e.g., ADA, Fair Housing, Fair Lending, Civil Rights Act, etc.) when determinations are reliant on AI-powered systems could result in a global reckoning. Companies operating in the U.S. would have unquestionable motivation to check their AI systems for harms against protected classes.

Low-income individuals are disproportionately vulnerable to many of the negative effects of AI. This is especially apparent with regard to credit and loan creation, because they are less likely to have access to traditional financial products or the ability to obtain high scores based on traditional frameworks. This then becomes the data used to create AI systems that automate such decisions.

The Consumer Finance Protection Bureau (CFPB) can play a pivotal role in holding financial institutions accountable for discriminatory lending processes that result from reliance on discriminatory AI systems. The mandate of an EO would be a forcing function for statements on how AI-enabled systems will be evaluated, putting companies on notice and better protecting the public with clear expectations on AI use.

There is a clear path to liability when an individual acts in a discriminatory way and a due process violation when a public benefit is denied arbitrarily, without explanation. Theoretically, these liabilities and rights would transfer with ease when an AI system is involved, but a review of agency action and legal precedent (or rather, the lack thereof) indicates otherwise.

The administration is off to a good start, such as rolling back a proposed HUD rule that would have made legal challenges against discriminatory AI essentially unattainable. Next, federal agencies with investigative or prosecutorial authority should clarify which AI practices would fall under their review and current laws would be applicable — for instance, HUD for illegal housing discrimination; CFPB on AI used in credit lending; and the Department of Labor on AI used in determinations made in hiring, evaluations and terminations.

Such action would have the added benefit of establishing a useful precedent for plaintiff actions in complaints.

The Biden administration has taken encouraging first steps signaling its intent to ensure inclusive, less discriminatory AI. However, it must put its own house in order by directing that federal agencies require the development, acquisition and use of AI — internally and by those it does business with — is done in a manner that protects privacy, civil rights, civil liberties, and American values.

News: Customer Care as a Service: outsourcing can help your startup wow clients 24/7

• April 22, 2021
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When should you consider outsourcing customer care, and what should you look for? Here’s an overview on how startups are leveraging Customer Care as a Service (CCaaS).

Your clients might not demand 24/7 customer service yet, but they’re certainly hoping for it. But how can a startup with a lean staff provide round-the-clock customer care? There are several options available, but more than ever, outsourcing is one of them.

When should your startup consider outsourcing its customer care? And what should you look for in a provider? Here are some insights on what Customer Care as a Service (CCaaS) can do for you, and how fast-growing startups have been leveraging this new class of partners to boost customer satisfaction.

Addressing customer care challenges

Customer Care as a Service can address several pain points, such as the need to provide support outside of business hours.

Since online shoppers didn’t have to wait for stores to open during lockdowns, they have increasingly been making purchases on evenings and weekends, and often tend to abandon their carts if nobody is around to answer their doubts. New clients aside, existing customers also hope to get responses outside of typical business hours.

The COVID-19 crisis has significantly increased the share of e-commerce in total retail in recent months, and these new purchasing habits are likely to stick, the OECD pointed out in a report last year. This led many small retailers to discover a reality that e-commerce startups already know well: When you are an online business, working hours aren’t really a thing.

And it’s not just e-commerce — from SaaS to mobility services, there is a growing range of startups for which always-on customer service no longer a luxury. French CCaaS provider Onepilot learned this first-hand: During its beta program, its “support heroes” were available from 7am to 1am, but it is now moving to 24/7 coverage due to greater demand from clients, co-founder Pierre Latscha told TechCrunch.

French micromobility startup Pony, one of Onepilot’s clients, needed reliable customer care for its dockless bike and scooter fleets in several cities, but couldn’t justify the expense of an in-house hire: “We didn’t have enough demand to have someone take care of customer service full-time,” Pony explained to French newspaper Les Échos (translation ours).

In such situations, outsourcing to a partner like Onepilot can save costs when demand isn’t high enough or constant, which is often the case when the business is seasonal or growing faster than the startup can address it.

The latter was the case for SPRiNG, a French subscription service for eco-friendly laundry detergent and cleaning products that has partnered with Onepilot. The startup launched in the summer of 2020, and thanks to €2.1 million in seed funding, its team tripled, but with “tens of thousands of clients”, it soon felt the need for more support to handle the growing volume of requests, co-founder Ben Guerville told us via email.

News: E-commerce tracking platform AfterShip raises $66M led by Tiger Global

• April 22, 2021
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AfterShip launched in 2012 to help online sellers track packages across different carriers, but since then it has built a suite of data analytics tools covering almost every step of the shopping experience, from email marketing to customer retention. The Hong Kong-headquartered startup announced today it has raised a $66 million Series B led by

AfterShip launched in 2012 to help online sellers track packages across different carriers, but since then it has built a suite of data analytics tools covering almost every step of the shopping experience, from email marketing to customer retention. The Hong Kong-headquartered startup announced today it has raised a $66 million Series B led by Tiger Global, with participation from Hillhouse Capital’s GL Ventures.

AfterShip’s last round of funding was a $1 million Series A in 2014. Co-founder Andrew Chan told TechCrunch that the company has been profitable since its launch and grew mainly through word-of-mouth referrals and partnerships, like a Shopify integration, that boosted its profile. But the company recently added a sales team and will use its latest capital on international hiring for sales and customer support. It also plans to launch new products and expand further in the United States, where about 70% of AfterShip’s customers are located.

The company’s software enables sellers to track shipments made through more than 740 carriers and handles more than 6 billion shipments each year. AfterShip’s partners with about10,000 companies, including some of the biggest names in e-commerce: Shopify (where it is used by 50,000 merchants), Magento, Squarespace, Amazon, eBay, Etsy, Groupon, Rakuten, Wish and retail brands like Dyson and Inditex.

A branded shipment tracking page and email created with AfterShip’s software

AfterShip’s core product is its shipment tracking platform, but it also makes apps for shoppers, including self-service returns and package tracking, and sales and marketing tools for merchants that let them get more use out of data from shipments. Chan explained that package tracking is also a user engagement tool for sellers that lets them show more product recommendations and promotions to shoppers. AfterShip’s tools enables merchants to create their own branded tracking pages and notifications. Other features allow them to track the performance of different carriers, create email marketing campaigns and increase customer retention.

Its CRM capabilities help AfterShip differentiate from other shipment tracking aggregator providers.

“When we think of our vision, we look at what Salesforce is doing, but is there an e-commerce Salesforce that can cover more topics for sales people to use,” Chan said.

In press statement, Pangfei Wang, global partner at Tiger Global, said, “AfterShip leads the charge in making the shipping process more transparent and reliable for consumers and companies alike. As growth in e-commerce spirals ever upward, we are excited to partner with AfterShip and its leadership team as they continue to advance technology in this critical and expanding industry.”

News: Google’s Anthos multi-cloud platform gets improved logging, Windows container support and more

• April 22, 2021
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Google today announced a sizable update to its Anthos multi-cloud platform that lets you build, deploy and manage containerized applications anywhere, including on Amazon’s AWS and (in preview) on Microsoft Azure. Version 1.7 includes new features like improved metrics and logging for Anthos on AWS, a new Connect gateway to interact with any cluster right

Google today announced a sizable update to its Anthos multi-cloud platform that lets you build, deploy and manage containerized applications anywhere, including on Amazon’s AWS and (in preview) on Microsoft Azure.

Version 1.7 includes new features like improved metrics and logging for Anthos on AWS, a new Connect gateway to interact with any cluster right from Google Cloud and a preview of Google’s managed control plane for Anthos Service Mesh. Other new features include Windows container support for environments that use VMware’s vSphere platform and new tools for developers to make it easier for them to deploy their applications to any Anthos cluster.

Today’s update comes almost exactly two years after Google CEO Sundar Pichai originally announced Anthos at its Cloud Next event in 2019 (before that, Google called this project the ‘Google Cloud Services Platform,’ which launched three years ago). Hybrid- and multi-cloud, it’s fair to say, takes a key role in the Google Cloud roadmap — and maybe more so for Google than for any of its competitors. And recently, Google brought on industry veteran Jeff Reed to become the VP of Product Management in charge of Anthos.

Reed told me that he believes that there are a lot of factors right now that are putting Anthos in a good position. “The wind is at our back. We bet on Kubernetes, bet on containers — those were good decisions,” he said. Increasingly, customers are also now scaling out their use of Kubernetes and have to figure out how to best scale out their clusters and deploy them in different environments — and to do so, they need a consistent platform across these environments. He also noted that when it comes to bringing on new Anthos customers, it’s really those factors that determine whether a company will look into Anthos or not.

He acknowledged that there are other players in this market, but he argues that Google Cloud’s take on this is also quite different. “I think we’re pretty unique in the sense that we’re from the cloud, cloud-native is our core approach,” he said. “A lot of what we talk about in [Anthos] 1.7 is about how we leverage the power of the cloud and use what we call ‘an anchor in the cloud’ to make your life much easier. We’re more like a cloud vendor there, but because we support on-prem, we see some of those other folks.” Those other folks being IBM/Red Hat’s OpenShift and VMware’s Tanzu, for example. 

The addition of support for Windows containers in vSphere environments also points to the fact that a lot of Anthos customers are classical enterprises that are trying to modernize their infrastructure, yet still rely on a lot of legacy applications that they are now trying to bring to the cloud.

Looking ahead, one thing we’ll likely see is more integrations with a wider range of Google Cloud products into Anthos. And indeed, as Reed noted, inside of Google Cloud, more teams are now building their products on top of Anthos themselves. In turn, that then makes it easier to bring those services to an Anthos-managed environment anywhere. One of the first of these internal services that run on top of Anthos is Apigee. “Your Apigee deployment essentially has Anthos underneath the covers. So Apigee gets all the benefits of a container environment, scalability and all those pieces — and we’ve made it really simple for that whole environment to run kind of as a stack,” he said.

I guess we can expect to hear more about this in the near future — or at Google Cloud Next 2021.

News: Brazil’s Loft adds $100M to its accounts, $700M to its valuation in a single month

• April 22, 2021
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Nearly exactly one month ago, digital real estate platform Loft announced it had closed on $425 million in Series D funding led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. The round included participation from a mix of new and existing investors such as DST, Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Fifth Wall and QED, among many others. At the

Nearly exactly one month ago, digital real estate platform Loft announced it had closed on $425 million in Series D funding led by New York-based D1 Capital Partners. The round included participation from a mix of new and existing investors such as DST, Tiger Global, Andreessen Horowitz, Fifth Wall and QED, among many others.

At the time, Loft was valued at $2.2 billion, a huge jump from its being just near unicorn territory in January 2020. The round marked one of the largest ever for a Brazilian startup.

Now, today, São Paulo-based Loft has announced an extension to that round with the closing of $100 million in additional funding that values the company at $2.9 billion. This means that the 3-year-old startup has increased its valuation by $700 million in a matter of weeks.

Baillie Gifford led the Series D-2 round, which also included participation from Tarsadia, Flight Deck, Caffeinated and others. Individuals also put money in the extension, including the founders of Better (Zach Frenkel), GoPuff, Instacart, Kavak and Sweetgreen.

Loft has seen great success in its efforts to serve as a “one-stop shop” for Brazilians to help them manage the home buying and selling process. 

Image courtesy of Loft

In 2020, Loft saw the number of listings on its site increase “10 to 15 times,” according to co-founder and co-CEO Mate Pencz. Today, the company actively maintains more than 13,000 property listings in approximately 130 regions across São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, partnering with more than 30,000 brokers. Not only are more people open to transacting digitally, more people are looking to buy versus rent in the country.

“We did more than 6x YoY growth with many thousands of transactions over the course of 2020,” Pencz told TechCrunch at the time of the company’s last raise. “We’re now growing into the many tens of thousands, and soon hundreds of thousands, of active listings.”

The decision to raise more capital so soon was due to a variety of factors. For one, Loft has received “overwhelming investor interest” even after “a very, very oversubscribed main round,” Pencz said.

“We have seen a continued acceleration in our market share growth, especially in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro, the two markets we currently operate in,” he added. “We saw an opportunity to grow even faster with additional capital.”

Pencz also pointed out that Baillie Gifford has relatively large minimum check size requirements, which led to the extension being conducted at a higher price and increased the total round size “by quite a bit to be able to accommodate them.”

While the company was less forthcoming about its financials as of late, it told me last year that it had notched “over $150 million in annualized revenues in its first full year of operation” via more than 1,000 transactions.

The company’s revenues and GMV (gross merchandise value) “increased significantly” in 2020, according to Pencz, who declined to provide more specifics. He did say those figures are “multiples higher from where they were,” and that Loft has “a very clear horizon to profitability.”

Pencz and Florian Hagenbuch founded Loft in early 2018 and today serve as its co-CEOs. The aim of the platform, in the company’s words, is “bringing Latin American real estate into the e-commerce age by developing online alternatives to analogue legacy processes and leveraging data to create transparency in highly opaque markets.” The U.S. real estate tech company with the closest model to Loft’s is probably Zillow, according to Pencz.

In the United States, prospective buyers and sellers have the benefit of MLSs, which in the words of the National Association of Realtors, are private databases that are created, maintained and paid for by real estate professionals to help their clients buy and sell property. Loft itself spent years and many dollars in creating its own such databases for the Brazilian market. Besides helping people buy and sell homes, it offers services around insurance, renovations and rentals.

In 2020, Loft also entered the mortgage business by acquiring one of the largest mortgage brokerage businesses in Brazil. The startup now ranks among the top-three mortgage originators in the country, according to Pencz. When it comes to helping people apply for mortgages, he likened Loft to U.S.-based Better.com.

This latest financing brings Loft’s total funding raised to an impressive $800 million. Other backers include Brazil’s Canary and a group of high-profile angel investors such as Max Levchin of Affirm and PayPal, Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, Instagram co-founder Mike Krieger and David Vélez, CEO and founder of Brazilian fintech Nubank. In addition, Loft has also raised more than $100 million in debt financing through a series of publicly listed real estate funds.

Loft plans to use its new capital in part to expand across Brazil and eventually in Latin America and beyond. The company is also planning to explore more M&A opportunities.

This article was updated post-publication to reflect accurate investor information

News: Universal Hydrogen raises $20.5M Series A to help launch hydrogen aviation

• April 22, 2021
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The race to decarbonize aviation got a boost this Earth Day with the announcement of a $20.5 million Series A round by Universal Hydrogen, a Los Angeles-based startup aiming to develop hydrogen storage solutions and conversion kits for commercial aircraft. “Hydrogen is the only viable path for aviation to reach Paris Agreement targets and help

The race to decarbonize aviation got a boost this Earth Day with the announcement of a $20.5 million Series A round by Universal Hydrogen, a Los Angeles-based startup aiming to develop hydrogen storage solutions and conversion kits for commercial aircraft.

“Hydrogen is the only viable path for aviation to reach Paris Agreement targets and help limit global warming,” said founder and CEO Paul Eremenko in an interview with TechCrunch. “We are going to build an end-to-end hydrogen value chain for aviation by 2025.”

The round was led by Playground Global, with an investor syndicate including Fortescue Future Industries, Coatue, Global Founders Capital, Plug Power, Airbus Ventures, Toyota AI Ventures, Sojitz Corporation and Future Shape.

The company’s first product will be lightweight modular capsules to transport “green hydrogen,” produced using renewable power to aircraft equipped with hydrogen fuel cells. The capsules will ultimately be available in different sizes for aircraft ranging from VTOL air taxis to long-distance, single-aisle planes.

“We want them to be interchangeable within each class of aircraft, a bit like consumer batteries today,” says Eremenko.

To help kickstart the market for its capsules, Universal Hydrogen is developing one such plane itself, a modified 40-60-seat turboprop capable of regional flights of up to 700 miles. The effort is a collaboration with seed investor Plug Power, which will supply the hydrogen and fuel cells, and magniX, which develops motors for electric aircraft.

Eremenko hopes to have the plane flying paying passengers in a larger, 50-plus seater aircraft by 2025 and ultimately to produce kits for regional airlines to retrofit their own aircraft.

“We want to have a couple of years of service to de-risk hydrogen certification and passenger acceptance before Boeing and Airbus decide on the airplanes they are going to build in the early 2030s,” says Eremenko. “It’s imperative that at least one of them build a hydrogen airplane or aviation is not going to hit its climate goals.”

Universal Hydrogen is not alone in betting on hydrogen. ZeroAvia in the U.K. is developing its own regional fuel cell aircraft on an even more ambitious timeline, and Airbus in particular has been working on hydrogen aircraft concepts.

Eremenko hopes that producing a simple and safe hydrogen logistics network will soon attract new entrants.

“It’s like the Nespresso system. We have to make the first coffee maker or nobody cares about our capsule technology, but we don’t want to be in the coffee maker business. We want other people to build coffee with our capsules.”

Universal Hydrogen will use the Series A funds to grow its current 12-person team to around 40 and accelerate its technology development.

30kW sub-scale demonstration of Universal Hydrogen’s aviation powertrain, with Plug Power’s hydrogen fuel cell and a magniX motor.