Monthly Archives: May 2021

News: Sinch, a Swedish customer engagement giant, raises $1.1B, SoftBank and Temasek participating

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Sinch — a Twilio competitor based out of Sweden that provides a suite of services to companies to build communications and specifically “customer engagement” into their services by way of APIs — has been on a steady funding and acquisitions march in the last several months to scale its business, and today comes the latest

Sinch — a Twilio competitor based out of Sweden that provides a suite of services to companies to build communications and specifically “customer engagement” into their services by way of APIs — has been on a steady funding and acquisitions march in the last several months to scale its business, and today comes the latest development on that front.

The company has announced that it has raised another $1.1 billion in a direct share issue, with significant chunks of that funding coming from Temasek and SoftBank, in order to continue building its business.

Specifically, the company — which is traded on the Swedish stock exchange Nasdaq Stockhom and currently has a market cap of around $11 billion — said that it was making a new share issue of 7,232,077 shares at SEK 1,300 per share, raising approximately SEK 9.4 billion (equivalent to around $1.1 billion at current rates).

Sinch said that investors buying the shares included “selected Swedish and international investors of institutional character,” highlighting that Temasek and SB Management (a direct subsidiary of SoftBank Group Corp.) would  respectively take SEK 2,085 million and 0.7 million shares. This works out to a $252 million investment for Temasek, and $110 million for SoftBank.

SoftBank last December took a $690 million stake in Sinch (when it was valued at $8.2 billion). That was just ahead of the company scooping up Inteliquent in the U.S. in January for $1.14 billion to move a little closer to Twilio’s home turf.

Sinch is not saying much more beyond the announcement of the share issue for now, except that the raise was made to shore up its financial position ahead of more M&A activity.

“Sinch has an active M&A-agenda and a track record of successful acquisitions, making [it] well placed to drive continued consolidation of the messaging and [communications platform as a service, CPaaS] market,” it said in a short statement. “Furthermore, the increased financial flexibility that the directed new share issue entails further strengthens the Company’s position as a relevant and competitive buyer.”

The company is profitable and active in more than 40 markets, and CEO Oscar Werner said in Sinch’s most recent earnings report that in the last quarter alone that its communications APIs — which works across  channels like SMS, WhatsApp, Facebook Messenger, chatbots, voice and video — handled 40 billion mobile messages.

Notably, its strategy has a strong foothold in the U.S. because of the Inteliquent acquisition. It will be interesting to see how and if it continues to consolidate to build up market share in that part of the world, or whether it focuses elsewhere, given the heft of two very strong Asian investors now in its stable. 

“Becoming a leader in the U.S. voice market is key to establish Sinch as the leading global cloud communications platform,” said Werner in January.

While Sinch has focused much of its business, like Twilio, around an API-based model focused on communications services, its acquisition of Inteliquent also gave it access to a large, legacy Infrastructure-as-a-Service (IaaS) product set, aimed at telcos to provide off-net call termination (when a call is handed off from one carrier to another) and toll-free numbers.

Tellingly, when Sinch acquired Inteliquent, the two divisions each accounted for roughly half of its total business, but the CPaaS business is growing at twice the rate of IaaS, which points to how Sinch views the future for itself, too.

News: Google’s data terms are now in Germany’s competition crosshairs

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Germany’s national competition regulator, the Bundeskartellamt, has continued its investigative charge against big tech — announcing that it’s opened two proceedings into Google. The move follows earlier proceedings targeting Amazon and Facebook — both of which are also looking to determine whether their businesses are of “paramount significance for competition across markets”, as German competition law

Germany’s national competition regulator, the Bundeskartellamt, has continued its investigative charge against big tech — announcing that it’s opened two proceedings into Google.

The move follows earlier proceedings targeting Amazon and Facebook — both of which are also looking to determine whether their businesses are of “paramount significance for competition across markets”, as German competition law puts it. (The regulator is also probing Facebook’s tying of Oculus to Facebook accounts.)

In Google’s case, one of the Bundeskartellamt’s new proceedings will confirm whether amended competition rules, which came into force in January, apply in its case — which would enable the FCO to target it with proactive interventions in the interests of fostering digital competition.

The second, parallel procedure will see the Federal Cartel Office (FCO) undertake an in-depth analysis of Google’s data processing terms in a move that looks intended to avoid wasting time — i.e. that its working assumption is that Google/Alphabet’s business meets the legal bar in the GWB Digitalisation Act.

By running the two Google procedures in parallel the German competition regulator will be in a position to act faster — assuming the first proceeding confirms it can indeed intervene.

The second probe running alongside would then identify potential problems to shape any intervention — with the FCO saying for example that it will look at whether Google/Alphabet “makes the use of services conditional on the users agreeing to the processing of their data without giving them sufficient choice as to whether, how and for what purpose such data are processed”.

It also says it will “examine the extent to which the terms provide Google with an opportunity to process data on an extensive cross-service basis” and will seek to clarify “how the company’s data processing policy applies to the processing of user data obtained from third-party websites and apps” (such as through Google’s advertising services).

Another key element of the proceeding will aim to establish what choice users actually have with regard to Google’s processing of their data, with the FCO noting that protecting consumer choice is a primary aim of competition law.

Given those point of focus it’s possible to imagine a future order from the FCO to Google could require it to simplify how it asks users for consent, to ensure genuine choice — and also shrink its ability to link first party user data with information obtained on people elsewhere online.

Commenting in a statement, Andreas Mundt, president of the Bundeskartellamt said: “An ecosystem which extends across various markets may be an indication that a company holds such a market position [i.e. whether it is of paramount significance across markets]. It is often very difficult for other companies to challenge this position of power. Due to the large number of digital services offered by Google, such as the Google search engine, YouTube, Google Maps, the Android operating system or the Chrome browser, the company could be considered to be of paramount significance for competition across markets.”

“Google’s business model relies to a very large extent on processing data relating to its users. Due to its established access to data relevant for competition, Google enjoys a strategic advantage. We will therefore take a close look at the company’s data processing terms. A key question in this context is whether consumers wishing to use Google’s services have sufficient choice as to how Google will use their data,” he added.

Reached for comment on the FCO proceedings, Google said it will fully cooperate with the FCO’s process but rejected the charge that people are forced to use its services — further claiming in a statement attributed to spokesperson, Ralf Bremer, that it offers “simple controls” so people can “limit” its use of their information:

“People choose Google because it’s helpful, not because they’re forced to, or because they can’t find alternatives. German consumers have enormous choice online and we give people simple controls to manage their information and limit the use of personal data. We will cooperate fully with the German Competition Authority and look forward to answering their questions.”

The Bundeskartellamt‘s in-depth prove of Google’s data processing terms picks up on long running criticism that the tech giant relies on forced and/or manipulative consent from users to obtain their data. Whereas the pan-EU legal standard if consent is used as a legal basis to process people’s information is that it should be clear, informed and freely given.

Back in 2019 Google was fined $57M by France’s data protection watchdog under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) over a failure to provide “sufficiently clear” information to Android users when it sought their consent to use their data for targeted ads.

However, subsequent to the CNIL’s action, the tech giant limited its exposure to the privacy regulation by changing the legal jurisdiction of where it processes European users’ data to Ireland.

The Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) then became Google’s lead data supervisor under the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism. And the DPC has not decided a single GDPR complaint against Google — though it has a number of open investigations. It continues to face high level criticism over its enforcement record on key cross-border cases against big tech.

The awakening of European competition regulators to the issue of how abuse of user privacy is an anti-competitive tactic that can lock in the dominance of digital giants by unfairly enabling them to grab and link people’s data is thus a very important development in the regulation of big tech — and one where the Bundeskartellamt has already been a pioneer.

In an earlier FCO ‘super profiling’ case against Facebook — which predates the amendments to national digital competition law — it ordered the social media behemoth not to combine user data from across its different products.

Facebook has sought to block the order in the German courts. And, back in March, the case was referred to Europe’s top court — meaning the FCO’s order to it remains on hold pending the CJEU’s ruling (which could take years to be handed down).

The FCO confirmed today that the Facebook case is still pending before the court, reiterating the decision of the Düsseldorf Higher Regional Court to refer certain issues relating to the application of the GDPR to the European Court of Justice — which means that a decision on the merits of the case “can only be rendered after these issues have been clarified”.

The Bundeskartellamt’s investigation of Facebook’s data practices started all the way back in in March 2016. So it’s a safe bet that the regulator’s experience of digging into the detail of how tech giants process people’s data — and how hard it is to make cases stick against them — has helped inform the amendments to Germany’s competition law that introduce ex ante powers to tackle digital giants deemed to be of “paramount significance for competition across markets”.

Although there is still another waiting period baked in to this approach — as the regulator must first assess whether tech giants meet that legal bar.

The EU has proposed a similar ex ante approach for what it dubs as digital “gatekeepers”, under the Digital Markets Act, which it introduced at the end of last year.

Although with the bloc’s co-legislative process ongoing that regulation is likely some years away from adoption and pan-EU application — meaning Germany’s national law and the energetic FCO could be a significant actor in the meanwhile.

The EU’s competition commission are also digging into Google’s adtech practices — though they’re having to do so under existing powers, for now, which have been shown to be a painstakingly slow and not very effective route to tackle digital market power.

Elsewhere in Europe, the UK, which now sits outside the bloc, is also shaping its own an ex ante regime to curb the market power of digital giants. So regardless of political cross-currents in the region — and the problem of patchy privacy enforcement — there is growing consensus that European competition authorities must be empowered to step in proactively to tackle digital market abuses.

 

News: Weight-loss platform Noom bulks up on $540 million in new funding

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Since the pandemic began last year, nearly 61% of adults in the United States gained weight, with the average adult surveyed gaining 15 pounds, according to a report from the American Psychological Association. Likely as a result of that rise in girths, Noom witnessed a surge of demand for its weight-loss app, generating $400 million in

Since the pandemic began last year, nearly 61% of adults in the United States gained weight, with the average adult surveyed gaining 15 pounds, according to a report from the American Psychological Association. Likely as a result of that rise in girths, Noom witnessed a surge of demand for its weight-loss app, generating $400 million in revenues in 2020 — almost twice the $237 million it made the year before.

Following on the heels of a banner year, and to fuel expansion into new categories and new countries around the globe, Noom announced this morning it had raised a $540 million Series F round led by Silver Lake. Other investors who participated in the round included Oak HC/FT, Temasek, Novo Holdings, Sequoia Capital, RRE, and Samsung Ventures.

“Most people want to eat healthier, exercise more, be less stressed, and get better sleep, but it’s not easy to change these behaviors,” said Saeju Jeong, co-founder and CEO of Noom in a statement. “This strategic round of funding reflects our investors’ confidence in the immense opportunity we have in building a business around helping as many people as possible live healthier lives through behavior change.”

Noom also announced the addition of two new board members, Silver Lake managing director Adam Karol, and former TaskRabbit CEO Stacy Brown-Philpot.

The Noom app may be a success now with 45 million downloads to date in 100 countries including the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, Ireland, and New Zealand, but cofounders Jeong and Artem Petakov officially founded their startup in 2007 as a different venture entirely, experimenting with a connected bike and calorie-counting app. It had some early success, but it wasn’t until 2017, when Jeong and Petakov released a customer-focused and weight-loss-oriented app that the startup finally hit its stride, resonating with legions of people who longed to shed the weight they’d gained. The company raised $58 million of funding in mid-2019 led by Sequoia.

“If you go and you say, ‘Hey, I can solve hypertension for you, nobody cares,” explains Noom president and co-founder Artem Petakov. “So we put our heads together, and thought, ‘how do you make it work with consumers?’ Well, weight loss is a human value proposition that’s working. Can we double-down on that?”

Though the Noom app enables users to count the number of calories they consume each day — a feature that other apps like MyFitnessPal, LoseIt!, and MyPlate Calorie Counter share — Noom says the key to its users keeping the weight off in the medium-to-long term lies in its use of Cognitive Behavioral Therapy, a goal-oriented psychotherapy treatment that helps people understand and combat the things that trigger negative thoughts, compulsive actions, and unwelcome consequences.

Whether Noom can maintain its momentum remains to be seen. According to a Bloomberg report last week, the startup has reportedly met with potential advisers to gear up for an IPO later this year or early next year with a targeted valuation of nearly $10 billion.

News: Affirm spinout Resolve raises $60M for its B2B ‘buy now, pay later’ platform

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Buy now, pay later is everywhere these days, mostly focused on the consumer. Resolve — a San Francisco-based startup in the space specializing in “buy now, pay later” capabilities for B2B transactions — announced today that it has raised $60 million in funding. Initialized Capital led the round — the company’s first funding since its

Buy now, pay later is everywhere these days, mostly focused on the consumer.

Resolve — a San Francisco-based startup in the space specializing in “buy now, pay later” capabilities for B2B transactions — announced today that it has raised $60 million in funding. Initialized Capital led the round — the company’s first funding since its 2019 inception. KSD Capital, Haystack VC, Commerce Ventures, Clocktower Ventures and others also participated.

The funding is a combination of equity and asset funding according to co-founder and CEO Chris Tsai, although he declined to reveal the breakdown.

Since launching as a spinout from Affirm in 2019, Resolve says it has seen “overwhelming” demand for its B2B buy now, pay later (BNPL) billing offering for business purchases. Notably, the two companies refer business to each other. Tsai describes Affirm founder Max Levchin as a “friend” with whom he has been working in a variety of capacities since 2012. (He’s also reportedly an investor in the company.)

Unlike Affirm — which is more focused on the consumer — Resolve is exclusively focused on business-to-business billing by automating the process of billing and purchasing on credit. What it’s doing is basically allowing businesses to defer payments digitally and on better terms than what they’ve seen historically via an automated underwriting process, the company claims. This, it says, can lead to faster invoice payment and thus, improved cash flow. 

The company also claims it can offer extended payment terms with buyers not having to pay any interest or fees if accounts are repaid within the agreed-upon terms. Meanwhile, merchants receive full payment (minus any fees) as soon as an order is placed. 

Resolve offers businesses loan terms ranging from 30 to 90 days and gives them more control of their billing and cash flow, according to Tsai. While he declined to give specifics around any growth metrics, he said the company has seen a “significant and meaningful” uptick in growth in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic because of so many businesses’ shift to digital e-commerce. For example, one of its customers is a bike merchant that had to expand into online selling in the wake of the pandemic.

“This is not a new transaction type, but being able to do it in this new digital or e-commerce way of buy now, pay later, like Affirm — that’s very new and in fact it’s still very much not the norm yet,” he told TechCrunch. “But we’re finding, especially post-pandemic, incredible demand for switching to more digital e-commerce payment formats.”

Among Resolve’s features is a “Smart Credit Engine,” which the company says creates a direct sync with a merchant’s real-time data feed of past payment histories to allow for “immediate” credit line decisioning with no input required from buyers.

Its embedded bill payment portal gives its B2B customers a way to pay vendor bills “while building their business credit history” bureaus, the company says.

“Digital and e-commerce transformation is coming for B2B payments,” Tsai said. “Growing companies must balance heightened demand for deferring payments from their business customers with their own limited capacities to satisfy that demand.”

The embedded nature of Resolve’s platform gives it an edge, Tsai believes, in that it integrates into a company’s existing financial tech stack. The benefit to the business, he said, is increased growth and sales revenue as well as optimized cash flow “while removing risk for the company.”

Initialized Capital General Partner Alda Leu Dennis said she was familiar with Tsai and co-founder Brian Nguyen since their days at Celery, their prior startup. She views them as experienced and determined.

“We also have conviction around the clear market need for digitizing net terms for small businesses that are increasingly moving their ordering online,” she said.

In her view, Resolve’s unique differentiation is that it provides software that solves net terms billing complexity. 

“Businesses desperately need to manage their B2B billing operations, from helping them gauge the strength of their customers to chasing down payments,” she told TechCrunch. “Their [Resolve’s] approach of accelerating payments and collections via software and offering payment terms as an ancillary service is a powerful pairing; it provides an easy yet comprehensive way for merchants to improve their entire system of managing receivables and billing on credit.”

The San Francisco startup is using the money primarily to grow its embedded billing platform.

“We’re doing a lot of work to scale the platform. So we’re investing heavily in products and the customer sides of the business, given all the demand that we’ve seen,” Tsai said. “The operations software that we’ve built is very seamless for our customers, but there’s a lot going on in the background that we have to do to reduce the complexity for our customers.”

News: Venture capital investment in Africa predicted to reach a record high this year

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Investments in African startups keep growing at a healthy pace ever since reports started keeping count in 2015. That year, publications Disrupt Africa and Partech released independently researched and contrasting figures showing that venture capital investments hit $186 million and $277 million, respectively. Those are ridiculously low figures for a continent when you consider that

Investments in African startups keep growing at a healthy pace ever since reports started keeping count in 2015. That year, publications Disrupt Africa and Partech released independently researched and contrasting figures showing that venture capital investments hit $186 million and $277 million, respectively. Those are ridiculously low figures for a continent when you consider that four-year-old Snapchat raised more than $500 million in one round that same year. However, while the disparity in funding between Africa and a single high-growth U.S. startup continues, the good news is that more money is coming into the continent.

In 2019, Africa’s venture capital investments rose to an all-time high, per Partech’s report. According to Partech, 234 African tech companies raised $2.02 billion in 250 equity rounds. This indicated a 74% increase from 2018’s figure of $1.163 billion raised by 146 startups in 164 rounds.  

There was shared optimism that 2020 would record a new high, but that was before the pandemic struck. For that reason, African tech ecosystem accelerator AfricArena predicted that venture capital funding in the continent’s startups would fall between $1.2 billion and $1.8 billion. In what may be described as an educated guess or a calculated prediction by the publication, year-end reports by Partech and Briter Bridges pegged total investment raised at $1.4 billion and $1.3 billion, respectively.

This year, AfricArena, in a new report, is predicting that VC funding in the continent’s startups would increase between $2.25 billion and $2.8 billion, which, if met, will surpass 2019 figures for a record high on the continent.

Here’s the rationale behind the prediction from an excerpt in the report:

We foresee that the first two quarters of 2021 will be similar Q4 2020 with the mix of factors. Vaccine campaigns will likely take longer than hoped to have a meaningful impact. However, this rollout – regardless of how long they will actually take – will eliminate the major uncertainty about the end of the pandemic, which is only a question of time.

As a result, we expect an extremely strong acceleration of deals from seed to Series B as well as major growth deals, together with some IPOs (Nigeria’s Interswitch, for example), that will propel deal activity to never seen before levels of activity. As of April 2020, our forecast for 2021 ranged from under $1.6 billion to over $3 billion. The worst-case scenario was based on a prolonged and fragmented impact on the African economies and the best-case scenario factoring in a full recovery Q1 2021. Based on the above observations, our views are now that 2021 will range between $2.25 and $2.8 billion.

As of April 30, the total disclosed venture capital funding stood a little over $800 million, according to Maxime Bayen, deal tracker and senior venture builder at BFA Global. If that pace is kept throughout the year, African startups might raise more than $2 billion.

In 2020, the number of early-stage deals increased, but there was a drop in growth deals and overall ticket sizes, constituting the drop in funding activities. Per Partech, seed rounds grew 80% year-on-year and accounted for 64% of all deals made. In total, African startups raised $220 million in seed funding, which was a 47% increase year on year. Series A and B rounds grew likewise. Series A deals went up 9% (86 rounds), and Series B deals, 16% (29 rounds), yet their investment sizes dropped 5% ($447 million) and 8% ($449 million), respectively.

Growth deals also dropped by 16%, and only two deals closed above $50 million compared to the 10 that took place in 2019, some of which include Interswitch, OPay, Branch and Andela.

The driving force to exceed the $2 billion mark in 2021 lies on VCs to make more deals and startups to replicate the large growth rounds of 2019. The former appears to be in place as African startups continue to raise money week in and week out. However, there’s still work to be done for the latter, as only two African startups have raised more than $100 million in a single round so far — fintech startups Flutterwave and TymeBank.

News: Indian logistics SaaS startup FarEye raises $100 million

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

FarEye, an Indian SaaS startup that helps firms globally optimize their supply chain and logistics operations, said on Tuesday it has raised a new financing round, its third since the pandemic broke last year, as it looks to further expand in international markets. The Noida-headquartered startup has raised $100 million in its Series E round,

FarEye, an Indian SaaS startup that helps firms globally optimize their supply chain and logistics operations, said on Tuesday it has raised a new financing round, its third since the pandemic broke last year, as it looks to further expand in international markets.

The Noida-headquartered startup has raised $100 million in its Series E round, which was co-led by high-profile backers TCV and Dragoneer Investment Group. Existing investors Eight Roads Ventures, Fundamentum, Honeywell also participated in the round, which takes seven-and-a-half-year-old startup’s to-date raise to about $153 million.

FarEye helps companies orchestrate, track, and optimize their logistics operations. The startup’s flagship logistics management software supports the entire supply chain — from first-mile seller pick-ups to last-mile delivery — to provide end-to-end logistics visibility, reduce operational costs and improve customer experience.

One use case of FarEye’s technology, as we wrote last year:

Say you order a pizza from Domino’s, the eatery uses FarEye’s service, which integrates into the system it is using, to quickly inform the customer how long they need to wait for the food to reach them.

Behind the scenes, FarEye is helping Domino’s evaluate a number of moving pieces. How many delivery people are in the vicinity? Can it bundle a few orders? What’s the maximum number of items one can carry? How experienced is the delivery person? What’s the best route to reach the customer? And, would the restaurant need the same number of delivery people the following day?

The startup works with over 150 e-commerce and delivery companies globally including popular names such as Walmart, UPS, DHL e-commerce, Domino’s, Posti, and Gordon Foods, and Amway, and processes over 100 million transactions each month.

More than two million vehicles and over 25,000 drivers are on FarEye’s platform today.

The coronavirus pandemic has helped the business as more companies, including large FMCG brands and retailers, begin to engage directly with customers, sort out their logistics and look for optimizing the cost, said Nahata in an interview.

“It’s not like these companies didn’t knew,” Nahata said, referring to companies building and digitizing their own logistics. “Earlier this was on their three-to-five year plans, but now they want to deploy this in within a quarter.”

“The logistics and supply chain industry is going through a long awaited software-led creative disruption, led by emerging leaders like FarEye that provide multi- tenant SaaS platforms with low code configuration to enhance visibility to the enterprise and deliver superlative last mile experiences for the end consumer. Gopi Vaddi, General Partner at TCV,

Customers are also beginning to place more orders online. “For existing customers, we have seen an increase in volume of orders especially in grocery and food categories,” he said.

The firm today also has clients in several international markets including the U.S., Europe, and Singapore, that is already bringing more than half of revenues for the startup and has grown nearly three times in the past 12 months.

Nahata said the startup didn’t initially think that Western markets would be prone to similar logistics challenges as those in India and other Asian markets, but he said despite the growth of e-commerce in some markets, some common underlying issues remain.

Nahata also pointed out that the payments infrastructure that has emerged in India in recent years still doesn’t exist in other markets, which creates an additional challenge to tackle for the firm.

“FarEye’s leading delivery management platform provides impressive visibility and control across the supply chain, which has never been more critical for retailers, manufacturers and 3PLs,” said Eric Jones, Partner at Dragoneer Investment Group, in a statement. “We look forward to partnering with FarEye as they continue to redefine how products are delivered across diverse logistics networks and expand their footprint in Europe and North America.”

The startup recently hired a number of senior executives including a new CRO (Amit Bagga — formerly President of APAC at BlueYonder and  and strategic sales leader at Oracle), and a new CPO (Suvrat Joshi — former executive at Dropbox, Amazon, Facebook, Microsoft.) It’s looking to further expand the team and is also open to exploring acquisition of smaller firms in international markets, said Nahata.

News: Interactio, a remote interpretation platform, grabs $30M after seeing 12x growth during COVID-19

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Interactio, a remote interpretation platform whose customers include massive institutions like the United Nations, European Commission and Parliament along with corporates like BMW, JP Morgan and Microsoft, has closed a whopping $30 million Series A after usage of its tools grew 12x between 2019 and 2020 as demand for online meeting platforms surged during the

Interactio, a remote interpretation platform whose customers include massive institutions like the United Nations, European Commission and Parliament along with corporates like BMW, JP Morgan and Microsoft, has closed a whopping $30 million Series A after usage of its tools grew 12x between 2019 and 2020 as demand for online meeting platforms surged during the coronavirus pandemic.

The Series A funding is led by Eight Roads Ventures and Silicon Valley-based Storm Ventures, along with participation from Practica Capital, Notion Capital, as well as notable angels such as Jaan Tallinn, the co-founder of Skype, and Young Sohn, ex-chief strategy officer of Samsung.

The Vilnius, Lithuania-based startup offers digital tools to connect meetings with certified interpreters who carry out real-time interpretation to bridge language divides between participants. It does also offer a video conferencing platform which its customers can use to run remote meetings but will happily integrate with thirty party software like Zoom, Webex etc. (Last year it says its digital tools were used alongside 43 different video streaming platforms.)

Interactio’s interpreters can be in the room where the meeting is taking place or doing the real-time interpretation entirely remotely by watching and listening to a stream of the meeting. (Or, indeed, it can support a mix of remote and on-site interpretation, if a client wishes.)

It can also supply all the interpreters for a meeting — and it touts a strict vetting procedure for onboarding certified interpreters to its platform — or else it will provide training to a customer’s interpreters on the use of its tools to ensure things run smoothly on the day.

At present, Interactio says it works with 1,000+ freelance interpreters, as well as touting “strong relations with interpretation agencies” — claiming it can easily quadruple the pool of available interpreters to step up to meet rising demand.

It offers its customers interpretation in any language — and in an unlimited number of languages per event. And last year it says it hosted 18,000+ meetings with 390,000 listeners spread across more than 70 countries.

Now, flush with a huge Series A, Interactio is gearing up for a future filled with increasing numbers of multi-lingual online meetings — as the coronavirus continues to inject friction into business travel.

“When we started, our biggest competition was simultaneous interpretation hardware for on-site interpretation. At that time, we were on the mission to fully replace it with our software that required zero additional hardware for attendees besides their phone and headphones. However, for institutions, which became our primary focus, hybrid meetings are the key, so we started partnering with simultaneous interpretation hardware manufacturers and integrators by working together on hybrid events, where participants use hardware on-site, and online participants use us,” a spokeswoman told us.

“This is how we differentiate ourselves from other platforms — by offering a fully hybrid solution, that can be integrated with hardware on-site basically via one cable.”

“Moreover, when we look at the market trends, we still see Zoom as the most used solution, so we compliment it by offering professional interpretation solutions,” she added.

A focus on customer support is another tactic that Interactio says it relies upon to stand out — and its iOS and Android apps do have high ratings on aggregate. (Albeit, there are bunch of historical complaints mixed in suggesting it’s had issues scaling its service to large audiences in the past, as well as sporadic problems with things like audio quality over the years.)

While already profitable, the 2014-founded startup says the  Series A will be used to step on the gas to continue to meet the accelerated demand and exponential growth it’s seen during the remote work boom.

Specifically, the funds will go on enhancing its tech and UX/UI — with a focus on ensuring ease of access/simplicity for those needing to access interpretation, and also on upgrading the tools it provides to interpreters (so they have “the best working conditions from their chosen place of work”).

It will also be spending to expand its client base — and is especially seeking to onboard more corporates and other types of customers. (“Last year’s focus was and still is institutions (e.g. European Commission, European Parliament, United Nations), where there is no place for an error and they need the most professional solution. The next step will be to expand our client base to corporate clients and a larger public that needs interpretation,” it told us.)

The new funding will also be used to expand the size of its team to support those goals, including growing the number of qualified interpreters it works with so it can keep pace with rising demand.

While major institutions like the UN are never going to be tempted to skimp on the quality of translation provided to diplomats and politicians by not using human interpreters (either on premise or working remotely), there may be a limit on how far professional real-time translation can scale given the availability of real-time machine translation technology — which offers a cheap alternative to support more basic meeting scenarios, such as between two professionals having an informal meeting.

Google, for example, offers a real-time translator mode that’s accessible to users of its smartphone platform via the Google voice assistant AI. Hardware startups are also trying to target real-time translation. The dream of a real-life AI-powered ‘Babel Fish’ remains strong.

Nonetheless, such efforts aren’t well suited to supporting meetings and conferences at scale — where having a centralized delivery service that’s also responsible for troubleshooting any audio quality or other issues which may arise looks essential.

And while machine translation has undoubtedly got a lot better over the years (albeit performance can vary, depending on the languages involved) there is still a risk that key details could be lost in translation if/when the machine gets it wrong. So offering highly scalable human translation via a digital platform looks like a safe bet as the world gets accustomed to more remote work (and less globetrotting) being the new normal.

“AI-driven translation is a great tool when you need a quick solution and are willing to sacrifice the quality,” says Interactio when we ask about this. “Our clients are large corporations and institutions, therefore, any kind of misunderstanding can be crucial. Here, the translation is not about saying a word in a different language, it’s about giving the meaning and communicating a context via interpretation.

“We strongly believe that only humans can understand the true context and meaning of conversations, where sometimes a tone of voice, an emotion and a figure speech can make a huge difference, that is unnoticed by a machine.”

News: AnyClip snaps up $47M for its video search and analytics technology

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Video is, quite literally, what gets the world moving online these days, expected to account for 82% of all IP traffic this year. Today a startup that has built a set of tools to help better parse, index and ultimately discover that trove of content is announcing a big round of funding to expand its

Video is, quite literally, what gets the world moving online these days, expected to account for 82% of all IP traffic this year. Today a startup that has built a set of tools to help better parse, index and ultimately discover that trove of content is announcing a big round of funding to expand its business after seeing 600% growth in the last year.

AnyClip — which combines artificial intelligence with more standard search tools to provide better video analytics for content providers to improve how those videos can be used and viewed — has raised $47 million, money that it will be using to build out its platform and where it can be applied.

The funding is being led by JVP, with La Maison, Bank Mizrahi and internal investors also participating. The company is not officially disclosing its valuation but has raised $70 million to date and I understand from reliable sources that it is around $300 million.

Founded in Tel Aviv and now co-headquartered in New York, the challenge that AnyClip is tackling is the fact that there is a huge amount of video out in the world today, and it remains one of the most-used content mediums, whether you are a consumer binging a Netflix series, someone trying to dig up an obscure classical music recording on YouTube, a business user on Zoom, or something in the very large in-between those scenarios. The problem is that in most cases, people are just scratching the surface when they search.

That’s not just because hosts tweak algorithms to lead to watching some things instead of others; it’s because in most cases it’s too difficult, and some might say impossible, to search everything in an efficient way.

AnyClip is among the tech companies that believe it’s not impossible. Using technologies that include deep learning models based on computer vision, NLP, speech-to-text, OCR, patented key frame detection and closed captioning to “read” the content in videos. It can recognize people, brands, products, actions, millions of keywords and build taxonomies based around what the videos contain. These can be based on, for example, content category, brand safety, or whatever a customer requests.

The videos that AnyClip currently works with are hosted by AnyClip itself — on AWS, president and CEO Gil Becker tells me — and the process of reading and indexing is super quick, “10x faster than real time.”

The resulting data and what can be done with it, as you might guess, has a lot of potential uses. Currently, Becker said that AnyClip is finding a strong audience among customers that are looking for ways of better organising their video content for a variety of use cases, whether that’s for internal purposes, for B2B purposes, or for consumers to better discover something.

And as the illustration above shows, that tech can be used, naturally, to better monetize video. By identifying more objects, themes, moods and language in videos more efficiently, AnyClip essentially can build a framework not just for people to better discover videos, but for advertisers to place ads next to whatever they want to be near (or conversely, better avoid content that they do not want any association with at all).

The list of those it works with is pretty impressive — it includes although Becker would not get very specific on what it does for all of its clients. It includes Samsung, Microsoft, AT&T, Amazon (Prime Video specifically), Heineken, Discovery, Warner Media (the latter two soon to be one), Tencent, Internet Brands and Google.

Among the work it does with Google, AnyClip does not count Google as an investor per se, but it has received funding from it, specifically as part of its Google News Initiative’s Innovation Challenge to create a streaming video page experience for media companies that mimics the functionality and design of today’s most popular video-on-demand services while accessing advanced video management tools supported by AnyClip’s AI backbone.  AnyClip was chosen from among hundreds of companies for its solution that allows companies to transform any library into a ‘Netflix or YouTube-like” library, creating channels and subchannels, in less than 30 seconds.

AnyClip has an interesting history that led to it building the search and discovery tools that it sells today. It started life back in 2009 with a concept that spoke directly to its name: it let media companies create clips of films that could be shared around the internet, which it hosted on a site of its own. These could be found using a number of taxonomies built by AnyClip’s algorithms, by humans at the company, and by contributors. Kind of like a Giphy before its time, if you will. 

It turned out to be possibly too far ahead of its time. At a time when piracy was still a big deal, and there were no Netflixes or other places for streaming efficiently and legally, the idea proved to be too complicated and too hard of a sell for rights owners. The company subsequently pivoted to building a video-based ad network, which itself was probably too early, too.

But there was something to the technology, given the right place and right time, and that seems to be where the startup has landed today, with patents behind what it has built and a team of engineers continuing to expand the tech. It hopes that this will be enough to keep it ahead of competitors, which include the likes of Kaltura, Brightcove and many others. And naturally, given the size of the opportunity, that competition will not be disappearing soon.

Notably, AnyClip’s own growth, on the back of what has up to now been a modest amount of funding ($30 million in 12 years) definitely speaks of its own ability not just to win business against them, but be capital efficient in what is typically considered a very bandwidth and resource-intensive medium.

“There is a revolution coming in the way enterprises use video to convey their message and their identity”, says Erel Margalit, JVP founder and Chairman, and Anyclip’s Board Chairman, in a statement. “For the first time, AI meets video. Companies and organizations are now working to utilize this to create a new mode of communications, internally and externally, in all areas where video dominates in a much stronger way than text. Whether it’s how to create videos for consumers or training videos for the organization, or learning how to manage conferences run by video on zoom which need intelligent management in the retrieving of content. This is a new era, and AnyClip is a vital tool for anyone embarking upon it.”

News: Facebook co-founder Saverin’s B Capital doubles down on SaaS in China

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

B Capital Group, the six-year-old venture capital fund formed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Bain Capital veteran Raj Ganguly, is doubling down on China as it looks to allocate $500 million to $1 billion of its fund into Chinese tech companies over the next few years. With $1.9 billion assets under management, B Capital

B Capital Group, the six-year-old venture capital fund formed by Facebook co-founder Eduardo Saverin and Bain Capital veteran Raj Ganguly, is doubling down on China as it looks to allocate $500 million to $1 billion of its fund into Chinese tech companies over the next few years.

With $1.9 billion assets under management, B Capital is going after enterprise software providers in China, an area that has seen “explosive growth” but is still only a “fraction the size of the U.S. SaaS market,” Ganguly said in an interview with TechCrunch.

The idea that Chinese companies are reluctant to shell out for software is “very backward-looking thinking”, he added.

One force fueling the boom of B2B companies in China is surging labor costs. As such, B Capital is hunting down software that could make labor and business operations more productive, and subsequently, give companies a competitive edge. Covid-19 accelerated the shift, as well-digitized companies had proven much more resilient to disruptions caused by the pandemic.

B Capital is able to discern what enterprises need thanks to its close partnership with Boston Consulting Group, which has a raft of customers ranging from healthcare, finance to transportation looking to digitize.

These large corporations “understand that their internal technology can’t be the only solution and they have to look to the outside and be willing to partner with early-stage, high-growth, or late-stage tech companies,” Ganguly suggested. They are also more willing to pay for software compared to scrappy, cash-strapped startups.

B Capital began deploying capital in China early this year and has already closed three deals. It’s stage-agnostic — though growth-stage startups are the focus — and plans to back 15-20 projects in China over the next few years. About 15 of its investment and operating employees are based out of Hong Kong and Beijing. It has around 110 staff worldwide.

Ganguly declined to disclose the names of its Chinese investees at this stage but said they include a biotech company, an automotive parts business, and an e-commerce enabler. Leveraging BCG’s expertise, the biotech company is learning how it can bring actual drugs to market faster. And the automotive business is similarly working with BCG to figure out its pricing and go-to-market strategy.

Going global

Overall, B Capital looks for opportunities in healthcare, fintech, industrial digitalization, and other horizontal enterprise services. Chinese startups that interest B Capital most are also those with the intention and ability to cross borders.

“Biotech is the area that we’ve been the most impressed by what’s happening in China and how that technology can be exported to other countries,” Ganguly said. B Capital has backed one biotech startup with offices in both Shanghai and Cambridge, Massachusettes, and is on track to close a deal with another that also straddles China and the U.S.

The other target is e-commerce, which Ganguly described as “cross-border by its nature” because a product is often sourced in one country, made in another, and then sold in a third market.

The investor is certainly right about the potential of cross-border e-commerce in China, where consumers have a big appetite for imported goods and manufacturers look for new ways to sell globally.

China is also in a good position to export its enterprise software, similar to how Indian counterparts have succeeded overseas, said Ganguly. The difference is that few Indian corporations are willing to pay big bucks for software, which forces B2B entrepreneurs to seek market abroad, whereas China’s domestic companies have an increasing demand for SaaS.

Despite ongoing geopolitical complications, Ganguly is optimistic that the world “is still moving towards globalization” over the long term.

“Certain innovation cycles have started in Silicon Valley and spread to places like China and Southeast Asia. But frankly, other innovation cycles have started in China and gone to South and Southeast Asia and the U.S. We think that China’s enterprise [software], artificial intelligence and biotech are some of the best technology that we’ve seen.”

But these globalizing companies must be able to adapt, hire talent outside their core market, get regulatory approvals, and build the right distribution networks, the investor suggested.

“I think that there are aspects of globalization that have become very politicized, and I think that’s unfortunate but understandable. Our belief is that businesses that we invest in have the ability to cross borders. Sometimes that means going from China to South and Southeast Asia, and sometimes that means extending to the U.S. Sometimes it just means the ability to import or export their products or software, and even staying in China where they can sell their technologies overseas.”

News: Germany gives greenlight to driverless vehicles on public roads

• May 25, 2021
• by:   
• in:  Blog 
• note:  no comments 

Germany has adopted legislation that will allow driverless vehicles on public roads by 2022, laying out a path for companies to deploy robotaxis and delivery services in the country at scale. While autonomous testing is currently permitted in Germany, this would allow operations of driverless vehicles without a human safety operator behind the wheel.  The

Germany has adopted legislation that will allow driverless vehicles on public roads by 2022, laying out a path for companies to deploy robotaxis and delivery services in the country at scale. While autonomous testing is currently permitted in Germany, this would allow operations of driverless vehicles without a human safety operator behind the wheel. 

The bill, which last week passed the Bundestag, Germany’s lower house of parliament, specifically looks at vehicles with Level 4 autonomy. Level 4 autonomy is a designation by the Society of Automobile Engineers (SAE) which means the computer handles all the driving in certain conditions or environments. In Germany, these vehicles will be limited to  geographic areas. 

“In the future, autonomous vehicles should be able to drive nationwide without a physically present driver in specified operating areas of public road traffic in regular operation,” reads the legislation. “According to the Federal Government, further steps must be taken to introduce corresponding systems into regular operation so that the potential of these technologies can be exploited and society can participate in them.” 

The bill still needs to pass through the upper chamber of parliament, or the Bundesrat. Included in the bill are possible initial applications for self-driving cars on German roads, such as public passenger transport, business and supply trips, logistics, company shuttles that handle employee traffic and trips between medical centers and retirement homes.

Companies looking to operate commercial driverless vehicles in Germany will need to adhere to a number of other rules, such as carrying liability insurance and having access to stop autonomous operations remotely.

Companies already testing in Germany might have an upper hand in Europe’s largest economy. Argo AI, for example, has been testing its autonomous vehicles at the LabCampus innovation center at Munich Airport. Last June, the company opened its European headquarters in the Bavarian city, and this summer it will open its test site in partnership with Volkswagen to test the VW ID.Buzz electric vans. Intel-subsidiary Mobileye also has a footprint testing AVs in Germany. 

Several U.S. states and countries have regulations around testing and potentially commercial deployment. Last week, Chinese robotaxi startup Pony.ai became the eighth company to be granted a permit to test driverless vehicles in California, and Nuro is the only company with a deployment permit to operate commercially on public roads in the state. In China, companies like Alibaba-backed AutoX are also testing driverless fleets on public roads. Germany’s legislation is a step beyond testing in the direction of integration into regular traffic.