Monthly Archives: April 2021

News: New Jersey announces $10M seed fund aimed at Black and Latinx founders

• April 6, 2021
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Today, in a twist, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has announced a proposal for a $10 million allocation in the state budget to create a seed fund for Black and Latinx startups, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The Black and Latinx Seed Fund will be administered by the New Economic Development Authority (NJEDA). NJEDA CEO Tim

Today, in a twist, New Jersey Governor Phil Murphy has announced a proposal for a $10 million allocation in the state budget to create a seed fund for Black and Latinx startups, TechCrunch has learned exclusively. The Black and Latinx Seed Fund will be administered by the New Economic Development Authority (NJEDA).

NJEDA CEO Tim Sullivan said based on research conducted by the state, that New Jersey is the first state in the nation to develop this type of fund.

He said the move is a “direct response to the systemic racial inequities in access to capital for Black and Brown entrepreneurs” and aimed at addressing “the racial wealth gap.”

“I think two of the centerpieces of Gov. Murphy’s strategy overall for the economy is to build a stronger and fairer New Jersey and a stronger and fairer economy,” Sullivan said, adding that the state is also focused on “reclaiming New Jersey’s heritage of leadership, innovation and entrepreneurship.”

It’s a known fact that the number of venture dollars flowing to Black and Latinx founders is dismally low.

As one evidence of that, last year Crunchbase found that as of Aug. 31, Black and Latinx founders had raised $2.3 billion in funding, representing just 2.6% of the total $87.3 billion in funding that had gone to all founders up until that point in 2020. 

Also, Digitalundivided’s ProjectDiane 2020 report found that Black and Latinx women founders received just $1.7 billion of the total $276.7 billion venture dollars invested between 2018 and 2019.

Over the past several months — in the wake of the murder of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement — we’ve seen an increasing number of venture funds announce initiatives toward funding a broader group of founders.

“Before there was a Silicon Valley, whether you’re talking about folks like Thomas Edison, Bell Labs or Sarnoff Labs, we were the place that perhaps more than any other place that fueled 20th century American entrepreneurial-led growth,” Sullivan told TechCrunch. “And the reality is that we lost a little bit of that. We’re still one of the top places for innovation and entrepreneurship, but other places –whether it’s out west or in places like Austin and Boston — have really upped their game and we want to recapture that unquestioned leadership position in innovation, entrepreneurship.”

Beyond that – under Gov. Murphy’s leadership – the state wants “to build the most diverse and inclusive innovation ecosystem in America.”

“That is a lot easier said than done, particularly because of not only centuries worth of systemic discrimination and racism, but some very specific manifestations of that systemic disenfranchisement and discrimination, particularly around venture capital funding and early stage seed funding,” added Sullivan, who once worked at Barclays Capital as chief of staff to the head of Global Investment Banking.

Zakiya Smith-Ellis, chief policy advisor to Gov. Murphy, said the initiative came after conversations with Black and Latinx business investors.

“This was developed with the input of folks who might be direct beneficiaries of this program and that community was directly impactful in designing and developing this proposal,” Smith-Ellis told TechCrunch. “We hear from them ‘we don’t have the family members, we don’t have the friends who are just going to write me a check at the very beginning, I think this is really instructive.’ ”

The legislature is set to vote on the proposal by July 1.

While it was difficult to find examples of governments doing similar things, there are a number of organizations out there that are committed to funding diverse founders.

In February, several national and Chicago-based organizations banded together to support early-stage Black and Latinx tech entrepreneurs through a new program dubbed TechRise. The nonprofit P33 launched the program in partnership with Verizon and 1871, a private business incubator and technology hub, among others, with the goals “of narrowing the wealth gap in Chicago, generating thousands of tech-related jobs and giving $5 million in grant funding to Black and Latino entrepreneurs,” according to the Chicago Sun Times. (Disclosure: Verizon is TechCrunch’s parent company).

And, Detroit-based ID Ventures says it invests in minority and women-led companies “at 4x the national average.”

“By providing opportunities to underrepresented entrepreneurs, we can ensure representation, respect our state’s diversity, and create a start-up community unlike any other,” the organization’s website says.

Also in Austin, DivInc is a nonprofit pre-accelerator that holds 12-week programs for underrepresented tech founders. Founded in 2016 by former Dell executive Preston James, the organization aims to “empower people of color and women entrepreneurs and help them build successful high growth businesses by providing them with access to education, mentorship, and vital networks.”

News: Note-taking app Mem raises $5.6 million from Andreessen Horowitz

• April 6, 2021
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The competition for note-taking is as fierce as it has ever been with plenty of highly-valued productivity startups fighting for an audience it can potentially serve endless productivity offshoots. In the past year, Notion raised at a $2 billion valuation, Coda raised at $636 million, and Roam raised at $200 million. A new competitor in

The competition for note-taking is as fierce as it has ever been with plenty of highly-valued productivity startups fighting for an audience it can potentially serve endless productivity offshoots. In the past year, Notion raised at a $2 billion valuation, Coda raised at $636 million, and Roam raised at $200 million.

A new competitor in the space is emerging out of stealth with fresh funding from Andreessen Horowitz. The free app, called Mem, is an early access platform dedicated to pushing users to quickly jot down their thoughts without focusing too heavily on the underlying organization of them. The startup’s founders have vast ambitions for what their platform could become down the road, tapping into further advances in machine learning and even AR.

“Really the differentiation is [information] that is summonable ubiquitously wherever you are,” Mem co-founder Kevin Moody tells TechCrunch. “So, in the near term, through your desktop app with Mem Spotlight as a heads-up display for wherever you are, in the medium term through an assistive mobile application, and then in the long term, imagine contact lenses that are overlaying useful content to you in the world.”

Moody and his co-founder Dennis Xu tell TechCrunch they’ve raised $5.6 million led by a16z with additional participation from their Cultural Leadership Fund, Will Smith’s dreamers.vc, Floodgate and Unusual Ventures. The round also was host to a handful of angel investors including Harry Stebbings, Julia Lipton, Niv Dror, Tony Liu, Rahul Vohra and Todd Goldberg, among others.

In its current iteration, Mem push users towards “lightweight organization” rather than clicking through folders and links to find the perfect place to nestle their thoughts. Users can quickly tag users or dedicated topics in their notes. The user workflow relies pretty heavily on search and chronological organization, presenting users with their most recently accessed notes. Users can also set reminders for certain notes, bringing a popular email framework to note-taking.

For users of stock apps like Apple Notes, these interface quirks may not sound very jarring, though the design is still a departure from apps like Notion and Airtable which have heavily focused on structure over immediacy.

Perhaps Mem’s biggest shift is how users access the information they’ve dumped into the platform. The founders say they want to avoid their app being seen as a “destination,” instead hoping users rely heavily on a keyboard-shortcut-prompted overlay called Mem Spotlight that allows them to search out information that they may need for an email, presentation or text message. The broader hope of the founders and investors behind Mem is that the team can leverage the platform’s intelligence over time to better understand the data dump from your brain — and likely other information sources across your digital footprint — to know you better than any ad network or social media graph does.

“What would it mean to just capture passively your digital footprint and then make use of that as though it were structured,” Moody posits. “If we can actually have our own Mem modeling of all of these entities, whether it’s text, or maybe it’s contacts, the people that you know, or it’s the events that you’re going to and these different sources feed into Mem, what would it mean for Mem to be able to have a product that is the ‘you’ API?”

For now, the startup’s app isn’t quite as grandiose in scale as what the founders may see in its future, but as Mem continues to onboard early users from its waitlist and add to its desktop functionality, the company is driving towards a platform they hope feels more instrumental to how its users “remember” information.

News: Wisk Aero sues Archer Aviation for alleged patent infringement, trade secret theft

• April 6, 2021
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Wisk Aero, the air mobility company borne out of a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Archer Aviation alleging patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation. Wisk claims in the lawsuit that Archer perpetrated a “brazen theft” of confidential information and intellectual property. The lawsuit points to the design of

Wisk Aero, the air mobility company borne out of a joint venture between Kitty Hawk and Boeing, filed a lawsuit Tuesday against Archer Aviation alleging patent infringement and trade secret misappropriation.

Wisk claims in the lawsuit that Archer perpetrated a “brazen theft” of confidential information and intellectual property. The lawsuit points to the design of Archer’s first electric aircraft that was released in February, which Wisk says is a copy of one of its potential designs. That design was submitted to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in January 2020, and Wisk alleges the similarities are too numerous to have been a coincidence.

Wisk further claims that during a forensic investigation it opened after Archer hired 10 former Wisk engineers, one of those hires secretly downloaded thousands of files before his departure. Another engineer also downloaded files, the suit alleges.

The information contained in the stolen files includes systems designs, test data, and aircraft designs, Wisk said in a blog posted Tuesday.

“As our Complaint explains, the design Archer disclosed above reflects its insider knowledge of Wisk’s extensive aerodynamic test and evaluation data based on years of experimentation and modeling,” the company said in the blog post. “The similarity in overall aircraft design further indicates Archer’s use of more detailed design features, including features related to aircraft propulsion, power management, avionics, flight control, and manufacturing methodology.”

Archer has snagged some major wins in 2021, including an announcement in February that it would merge with special purpose acquisition company Atlas Crest Investment Corp. for an equity valuation of $3.8 billion. Also in February, the Palo Alto, California-based startup landed a $1 billion order with United Airlines as a customer and investor.

“It’s regrettable that Wisk would engage in litigation in an attempt to deflect from the business issues that have caused several of its employees to depart,” an Archer spokesperson said in an email to TechCrunch. The plaintiff raised these matters over a year ago, and after looking into them thoroughly, we have no reason to believe any proprietary Wisk technology ever made its way to Archer.  We intend to defend ourselves vigorously.”

The Archer spokesperson added that the company has “placed an employee on paid administrative leave in connection with a government investigation and a search warrant issued to the employee, which we believe are focused on conduct prior to the employee joining the company. Archer and three other Archer employees with whom the individual worked also have received subpoenas relating to this investigation, and all are fully cooperating with the authorities.”

The suit was filed with the California Northern District Court under case no. 5:21-cv-02450.

News: GM to build an electric Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck with more than 400 miles of range

• April 6, 2021
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GM is adding an electric Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck to its lineup, as the automaker pushes to deliver more than 1 million electric vehicles globally by 2025. GM President Mark Reuss said Tuesday that the Chevrolet Silverado electric full-size pickup will be based on the automaker’s Ultium battery platform and will have an estimated range of

GM is adding an electric Chevrolet Silverado pickup truck to its lineup, as the automaker pushes to deliver more than 1 million electric vehicles globally by 2025.

GM President Mark Reuss said Tuesday that the Chevrolet Silverado electric full-size pickup will be based on the automaker’s Ultium battery platform and will have an estimated range of more than 400 miles on a full charge. It should be noted this is GM’s forecast not an official EPA figure.

GM is positioning the full-sized pickup for both consumer and commercial markets. Reuss said that retail and fleet versions of the Silverado electric pickup will be offered with a variety of options and configurations.

“I’m particularly excited about its potential in the fleet and commercial space, a crucial part of the EV market, especially initially,” Reuss said during a presentation at the company’s Factory ZERO assembly plant in Detroit and Hamtramck.

The electric Silverado will go head to head with Ford’s upcoming electric F-150. And while new EV entrant Rivian is not going after the commercial market, its electric RT1 pickup will also provide competition in the space. Rivian is expected to begin deliveries of its electric RT1 pickup truck this summer.

The news also follows a string of announcements over the past 18 months, including the GM’s Ultium battery platform and the launch of BrightDrop, an a new business unit to offer commercial customers — starting with FedEx — an ecosystem of electric and connected products. BrightDrop will begin with two main products: an electric van called the EV600 with an estimate range of 250 miles and a pod-like electric pallet dubbed EP1.

Last year, GM committed more than $27 billion to EV and AV product development, including $7 billion in 2021 and plans to launch 30 EVs globally by the end of 2025, with more than two-thirds available in North America.

Reuss said that the company will build the Silverado electric pickup truck at the company’s Factory ZERO assembly plant in Detroit and Hamtramck, Michigan. He confirmed that the GMC Hummer EV SUV, which was unveiled over the weekend, will also be built at the factory. GM renamed its Detroit-Hamtramck assembly plant “Factory ZERO” in October 2020 and later said it would invest $2.2 billion in the factory to produce a variety of all-electric trucks and SUVs.

The facility, which is is undergoing a complete renovation and retooling and has expanded to more than 4.5 million square feet, will also produce the GMC Hummer EV pickup and the Cruise Origin, a purpose-built, all-electric and shared self-driving vehicle. Production of the GMC Hummer EV pickup will begin later this year.

News: Esri brings its flagship ArcGIS platform to Kubernetes

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Esri, the geographic information system (GIS), mapping and spatial analytics company, is hosting its (virtual) developer summit today. Unsurprisingly, it is making a couple of major announcements at the event that range from a new design system and improved JavaScript APIs to support for running ArcGIS Enterprise in containers on Kubernetes. The Kubernetes project was

Esri, the geographic information system (GIS), mapping and spatial analytics company, is hosting its (virtual) developer summit today. Unsurprisingly, it is making a couple of major announcements at the event that range from a new design system and improved JavaScript APIs to support for running ArcGIS Enterprise in containers on Kubernetes.

The Kubernetes project was a major undertaking for the company, Esri Product Managers Trevor Seaton and Philip Heede told me. Traditionally, like so many similar products, ArcGIS was architected to be installed on physical boxes, virtual machines or cloud-hosted VMs. And while it doesn’t really matter to end-users where the software runs, containerizing the application means that it is far easier for businesses to scale their systems up or down as needed.

“We have a lot of customers — especially some of the larger customers — that run very complex questions,” Seaton explained. “And sometimes it’s unpredictable. They might be responding to seasonal events or business events or economic events, and they need to understand not only what’s going on in the world, but also respond to their many users from outside the organization coming in and asking questions of the systems that they put in place using ArcGIS. And that unpredictable demand is one of the key benefits of Kubernetes.”

The team could have chosen to go the easy route and put a wrapper around its existing tools to containerize them and call it a day, but as Seaton noted, Esri used this opportunity to re-architect its tools and break it down into microservices.

“It’s taken us a while because we took three or four big applications that together make up [ArcGIS] Enterprise,” he said. “And we broke those apart into a much larger set of microservices. That allows us to containerize specific services and add a lot of high availability and resilience to the system without adding a lot of complexity for the administrators — in fact, we’re reducing the complexity as we do that and all of that gets installed in one single deployment script.”

While Kubernetes simplifies a lot of the management experience, a lot of companies that use ArcGIS aren’t yet familiar with it. And as Seaton and Heede noted, the company isn’t forcing anyone onto this platform. It will continue to support Windows and Linux just like before. Heede also stressed that it’s still unusual — especially in this industry — to see a complex, fully integrated system like ArcGIS being delivered in the form of microservices and multiple containers that its customers then run on their own infrastructure.

In addition to the Kubernetes announcement, Esri also today announced new JavaScript APIs that make it easier for developers to create applications that bring together Esri’s server-side technology and the scalability of doing much of the analysis on the client-side. Back in the day, Esri would support tools like Microsoft’s Silverlight and Adobe/Apache Flex for building rich web-based applications. “Now, we’re really focusing on a single web development technology and the toolset around that,” Esri product manager Julie Powell told me.

A bit later this month, Esri also plans to launch its new design system to make it easier and faster for developers to create clean and consistent user interfaces. This design system will launch April 22, but the company already provided a bit of a teaser today. As Powell noted, the challenge for Esri is that its design system has to help the company’s partners to put their own style and branding on top of the maps and data they get from the ArcGIS ecosystem.

 

News: Will Topps’ SPAC-led debut expand the bustling NFT market?

• April 6, 2021
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Twitter is abuzz with the news that Topps, a company perhaps best known for making collectible trading cards, is going public via a SPAC. The reverse merger with its chosen blank-check company values the combination on an equity basis at $1.163 billion. That makes Topps some sort of unicorn. And because it has both e-commerce

Twitter is abuzz with the news that Topps, a company perhaps best known for making collectible trading cards, is going public via a SPAC.

The reverse merger with its chosen blank-check company values the combination on an equity basis at $1.163 billion. That makes Topps some sort of unicorn. And because it has both e-commerce and digital angles, Topps is technically a fruit tech company.

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Why do we care? We care because Topps and its products are popular with the same set of folks who are very excited about creating rare digital items on particular blockchains. Yes, the baseball card company is going public in a debut that could easily be read as a way to put money into the NFT craze without actually having to buy cryptocurrencies and go speculating itself.

And Topps apparently owns a number of assets in the candy space, which I find whimsical.

So let’s have a small giggle as we go through the Topps deck and then ask if the company is being valued on its actual, and modestly attractive, present-day business or on possible revenues from future NFT-related activities.

So, trading cards

What is Topps? A mix of business units that it breaks down into four categories: Physical Sports and Entertainment (trading cards), Digital Sports and Entertainment (digital collectibles, apps and games), Gift Cards (gift cards for external brands), and Confections (candy).

In terms of scale, the company’s physical goods and confection businesses are by far its leading revenue drivers. Here’s the data:

First, observe that the company’s pro forma adjusted EBITDA nearly doubled from 2019 to 2020. That’s an aggressive expansion in hyper-adjusted profitability. And note how much the company’s physical sports business grew from 2019 to 2020; a nearly 50% gain helped the company grow nicely last year.

News: Facebook confirms ‘test’ of Venmo-like QR codes for person-to-person payments in U.S.

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Facebook confirms it’s testing a new QR code feature and payment links for use with Facebook Pay to make it easier for people in the U.S. to send or request money from one another. The QR code feature, similar to Venmo’s QR codes and others, will allow a user to scan a friend’s code with

Facebook confirms it’s testing a new QR code feature and payment links for use with Facebook Pay to make it easier for people in the U.S. to send or request money from one another. The QR code feature, similar to Venmo’s QR codes and others, will allow a user to scan a friend’s code with their smartphone’s camera to send or request money, while the sharable payment links will let you publish your payment address outside of Facebook itself.

The addition was first spotted on Monday by MacRumors, which noted that users were being presented with a new “Scan” button in the Facebook Pay carousel at the top of the screen. When you tap this button, you’re launched into an experience where you can scan the other person’s code. The screen that displays the QR code also introduces the personalized payment URL in the format of “https://m.me/pay/UserName,” which can also be sent to others when you’re making a payment or sending a request.

A Facebook spokesperson confirmed the feature’s launch, but characterized it as a “test” that’s currently taking place in the U.S.

“To make payments on Messenger even easier, we’ve begun testing the ability for people to use QR codes and payment links when they want to send or request money,” the spokesperson said.

Only U.S. users are able to send payments through Messenger at this time, they also noted.

Users who want to be able to send and receive money in Messenger have to be at least 18 years old, and will have to have a Visa or Mastercard debit card, a PayPal account, or one of the supported prepaid cards or government-issued cards, in order to use the payments feature. They’ll also need to set their preferred currency to U.S. dollars in the app.

Facebook first launched its Facebook Pay service in November 2019, as a way to establish a single payment system that can extend across the company’s apps. However, the service as it stands today is not necessarily a rival to other apps like PayPal, because Facebook currently partners with PayPal as one of the supported payment methods.

Currently, Facebook Pay powers the payments experience across a number of areas in Facebook, which are focused on commerce, donations and tipping  — like Facebook Marketplace, Facebook Shop, Buy on Instagram, and for other activities — like buying Stars to support gaming Creators, buying tickets to live events, making donations to causes, and more. Users can also send money to friends on Messenger through a built-in button.

For the time being, this payments experience is separate from Facebook’s cryptocurrency wallet, Novi, though one could imagine that in time the two will become more integrated.

Facebook declined to share further details about the test, including how many or what percentage of users will see the new QR codes and links or when tests began and when they’ll end.

 

News: Robotic exoskeleton maker Sarcos announces SPAC plans

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While it’s true the VC world has gone SPAC-happy, the reverse merger method hasn’t been a huge driver in robotics thus far, with some notable exceptions like Berkshire-Grey. This morning, however, Utah-based Sarcos Robotics announced plans to board the SPAC train, courtesy of Rotor Acquisition Corp. The deal could potentially value the robotic exoskeleton maker

While it’s true the VC world has gone SPAC-happy, the reverse merger method hasn’t been a huge driver in robotics thus far, with some notable exceptions like Berkshire-Grey. This morning, however, Utah-based Sarcos Robotics announced plans to board the SPAC train, courtesy of Rotor Acquisition Corp.

The deal could potentially value the robotic exoskeleton maker and blank check co. at a combined $1.3 billion, along with a potential $281 million earn out. Sarcos is, of course, one of a number of companies currently exploring the robotic exoskeleton category. So, what sets the company apart, beyond some heavy-duty James Cameron-style design language?

Partnership are always a big motivator. Sarcos lined up a pretty big one way back at CES 2020. It was positioned at the center of Delta’s big tech push at the trade show.

“Delta’s employees are the key ingredient to our success, and we are committed to reducing on-the-job injuries as well as fostering workforce diversity and improving worker longevity for a healthier and safer team,” Delta CEO Ed Bastian said in today’s announcement. “My enthusiasm for Sarcos’ potential has only grown since then as we continue to work closely with Sarcos to turn our everyday heroes into superheroes, making their jobs safer and easier than ever.”

At the time, the airline announced that it would be partnering with the company to pilot these exoskeletons among its staff. The robotics-maker noted then that the tech can be used to lift 200-pound payloads for up to eight hours, without tiring the wearer. It’s in line with Sarcos’ more industrial-minded approach to wearable robotics.

Later that same year, the company announced a $40 million raise aimed at commercializing its Guardian XO unit. In today’s release, it adds that it expects to deliver the system at some point in the middle of next year, with the teleoperated Guardian XT arriving the following.

In October of last year, the Sarcos was awarded a grant from the U.S. Navy to produce remote-operated versions of its XO system, as military funding continues to be a big driver of the robotics industry.

News: Answers being sought from Facebook over latest data breach

• April 6, 2021
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Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in the European Union is seeking answers from the tech giant over a major data breach reported on over the weekend. The breach was reported on by Business Insider on Saturday which said personal data (including email addresses and mobile phone numbers) of more than 500M Facebook accounts had been

Facebook’s lead data protection regulator in the European Union is seeking answers from the tech giant over a major data breach reported on over the weekend.

The breach was reported on by Business Insider on Saturday which said personal data (including email addresses and mobile phone numbers) of more than 500M Facebook accounts had been posted to a low level hacking forum — making the personal information on hundreds of millions of Facebook users’ accounts freely available.

“The exposed data includes the personal information of over 533M Facebook users from 106 countries, including over 32M records on users in the US, 11M on users in the UK, and 6M on users in India,” Business Insider said, noting that the dump includes phone numbers, Facebook IDs, full names, locations, birthdates, bios, and some email addresses.

Facebook responded to the report of the data dump by saying it related to a vulnerability in its platform it had “found and fixed” in August 2019 — dubbing the info “old data” which it also claimed had been reported on in 2019. However as security experts were quick to point out, most people don’t change their mobile phone number often — so Facebook’s trigger reaction to downplay the breach looks like an ill-thought through attempt to deflect blame.

It’s also not clear whether all the data is all ‘old’, as Facebook’s initial response suggests.

There’s plenty of reasons for Facebook to try to downplay yet another data scandal. Not least because, under European Union data protection rules, there are stiff penalties for companies that fail to promptly report significant breaches to relevant authorities. And indeed for breaches themselves — as the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) bakes in an expectation of security by design and default.

By pushing the claim that the leaked data is “old” Facebook may be hoping to peddle the idea that it predates the GDPR coming into application (in May 2018).

However the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC), Facebook’s lead data supervisor in the EU, told TechCrunch that it’s not abundantly clear whether that’s the case at this point.

“The newly published dataset seems to comprise the original 2018 (pre-GDPR) dataset and combined with additional records, which may be from a later period,” the DPC’s deputy commissioner, Graham Doyle said in a statement.

“A significant number of the users are EU users. Much of the data appears to been data scraped some time ago from Facebook public profiles,” he also said.

“Previous datasets were published in 2019 and 2018 relating to a large-scale scraping of the Facebook website which at the time Facebook advised occurred between June 2017 and April 2018 when Facebook closed off a vulnerability in its phone lookup functionality. Because the scraping took place prior to GDPR, Facebook chose not to notify this as a personal data breach under GDPR.”

Doyle said the regulator sought to establish “the full facts” about the breach from Facebook over the weekend and is “continuing to do so” — making it clear that there’s an ongoing lack of clarity on the issue, despite the breach itself being claimed as “old” by Facebook.

The DPC also made it clear that it did not receive any proactive communication from Facebook on the issue — despite the GDPR putting the onus on companies to proactively inform regulators about significant data protection issues. Rather the regulator had to approach Facebook — using a number of channels to try to obtain answers from the tech giant.

Through this approach the DPC said it learnt Facebook believes the information was scraped prior to the changes it made to its platform in 2018 and 2019 in light of vulnerabilities identified in the wake of the Cambridge Analytica data misuse scandal.

A huge database of Facebook phone numbers was found unprotected online back in September 2019.

Facebook had also earlier admitted to a vulnerability with a search tool it offered — revealing in April 2018 that somewhere between 1BN and 2BN users had had their public Facebook information scraped via a feature which allowed people to look up users by inputting a phone number or email — which is one potential source for the cache of personal data.

Last year Facebook also filed a lawsuit against two companies it accused of engaging in an international data scraping operation.

But the fallout from its poor security design choices continue to dog Facebook years after its ‘fix’.

More importantly, the fallout from the massive personal data spill continues to affect Facebook users whose information is now being openly offered for download on the Internet — opening them up to the risk of spam and phishing attacks and other forms of social engineering (such as for attempted identity theft).

There are still more questions than answers about how this “old” cache of Facebook data came to be published online for free on a hacker forum.

The DPC said it was told by Facebook that “the data at issue appears to have been collated by third parties and potentially stems from multiple sources”.

The company also claimed the matter “requires extensive investigation to establish its provenance with a level of confidence sufficient to provide your Office and our users with additional information” — which is a long way of suggesting that Facebook has no idea either.

“Facebook assures the DPC it is giving highest priority to providing firm answers to the DPC,” Doyle also said. “A percentage of the records released on the hacker website contain phone numbers and email address of users.

“Risks arise for users who may be spammed for marketing purposes but equally users need to be vigilant in relation to any services they use that require authentication using a person’s phone number or email address in case third parties are attempting to gain access.”

“The DPC will communicate further facts as it receives information from Facebook,” he added.

At the time of writing Facebook had not responded to a request for comment about the breach.

Facebook users who are concerned whether their information is in the dump can run a search for their phone number or email address via the data breach advice site, haveibeenpwned.

According to haveibeenpwned’s Troy Hunt, this latest Facebook data dump contains far more mobile phone numbers than email addresses.

He writes that he was sent the data a few weeks ago — initially getting 370M records and later “the larger corpus which is now in very broad circulation”.

“A lot of it is the same, but a lot of it is also different,” Hunt also notes, adding: “There is not one clear source of this data.”

 

News: Real raises $10M from Lightspeed, Megan Rapinoe and others to rethink therapy

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The last year has put a spotlight on mental health, and startup Real is looking to shake up the space with a product that makes group therapy available on-demand. Founded by CEO Ariela Safira, Real is inspired by a long-standing methodology in the world of mental health: Group therapy. AA, for instance, has been around

The last year has put a spotlight on mental health, and startup Real is looking to shake up the space with a product that makes group therapy available on-demand.

Founded by CEO Ariela Safira, Real is inspired by a long-standing methodology in the world of mental health: Group therapy. AA, for instance, has been around for decades and proven to be incredibly effective for some. But that format isn’t as readily available across a variety of issues beyond the disease of addiction.

To deploy this service, Real has raised $10 million in Series A financing, led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from existing and new investors, including Megan Rapinoe and Minnesota Vikings Linebacker Eric Kendricks.

Real employs full-time therapists to lead group therapy across a variety of issues, including exploration of sexuality, anxiety, managing anger with family members, and other real-world issues. With Real, users pay $28/month to have access to these pathways (as Real calls them), letting users watch these group therapy sessions on-demand and get journal prompts and other resources.

One of the benefits of this platform is that users can get more tactical advice on these things, rather than trying to explore the problems. They also feel less alone, as they see others are struggling with the same things.

Perhaps most importantly, Real allows users to tap into the conversations and therapy they need at the time they want it.

Safira explained that she might be deep in her thoughts and feelings on Wednesday at 11pm, but can’t get a one-on-one therapy session until 2pm on Monday. Her state may have changed. With Real, she can get online and access the right pathway in the moment.

Interestingly, Real’s research shows that most people doing one-on-one therapy said they went for general anxiety, relationship problems, and career advice. However, on Real, the top pathways are sexuality, motherhood, and intimacy. The conclusion is that the things people want to work on the most are not always the things they’re most comfortable digging into in a one-on-one setting.

By scaling group therapy sessions to an on-demand audience, Real has been able to bring the cost of this type of service way down, especially when compared to one-on-one therapy.

Real is the product of many years of work in the mental health space. While she was studying for her undergrad at Stanford, Safira’s friend attempted suicide. It was her first time confronting the mental health system and it made her wonder why the system was designed the way it was. She threw herself in.

“I spent two to three years working on how to redesign the mental health care system,” she said. “That entails, visiting and flying to rehab centers, therapy offices, architecture firms that have built those spaces to learn why we make the decisions in mental health care that we make. Things like is there research behind the bright white walls in inpatient mental health facilities, and if not, is that based on legal hurdles or financial hurdles? I really wanted to get into the foundation of how to build a system.”

She dropped out of Stanford, then returned to Stanford, then went to Columbia for her masters, and then dropped out of Columbia to start Real. And the time seems to finally be right. Real has attracted investment from big names in institutional VC and big names in general.

“[Ariela] looked at something that has been around for so long, therapies in the traditional sense, and flipped it on its head to break up the status quo, and I thought that was really interesting and innovative,” said Megan Rapinoe in an interview with TechCrunch. “There are obviously a lot of barriers to access mental health services, for a lot of different reasons. Hopefully, this platform can make it easier for people to get the help that they need.”

Rapinoe is but one of the big names invested in Real. She is joined by Gwyneth Paltrow and Eric Kendricks.

Kendricks explained that he had never been averse to therapy but that he learned a lot after meeting his now-fiance and hearing about her struggles and the struggles of her family, which has dealt with a variety of mental health issues.

“Everything was going was going well for me,” he said. “I was always playing well in the field, and financially, I’m making more money than when I was a kid. But I did have moments where I was questioning myself and in my head a lot and it’s kind of a weird feeling. I had to take a step back and I realized that I was going through a little bit of something. But based on the conversations I had with my fiance, I used my resources to to find the help that I needed and it was amazing.”

He explained that the shift in society’s mentality around mental health has paved the way for a product like Real, which is a more proactive and preventative approach to mental wellness.

But Real has also been able to react quickly to big events in our world. The company has launched a product called Real to the People, which offers free access to the platform during moments of crisis, including the COVID-19 pandemic, the murder of George Floyd, and most recently, the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes.

Nicole Quinn, partner at Lightspeed, explained that the firm has had an interest in the mental health space for a long time. In fact, LSVP is an investor in Calm.

“The ‘aha’ moment for me was when I looked at the disease of alcoholism,” said Quinn, who led the round in Calm. “You get to go to Alcoholics Anonymous, and you really benefit through having groups. Can we apply that same group method by scaling to other areas. We have a fundamental belief that yes, you can.”

Real has raised a total of $16 million since launch.