Monthly Archives: July 2021

News: Bezos and crew host a giddy press conference after Blue Origin’s inaugural crewed launch

• July 20, 2021
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Jeff Bezos was so triumphant he was practically glowing at a press conference following the Blue Origin’s first crewed mission to space, 21 years after he founded the company in 2000. The billionaire talked about the future of the company and his role in it, and then casually gave away a couple hundred million dollars.

Jeff Bezos was so triumphant he was practically glowing at a press conference following the Blue Origin’s first crewed mission to space, 21 years after he founded the company in 2000. The billionaire talked about the future of the company and his role in it, and then casually gave away a couple hundred million dollars.

Bezos was one of four that rode in the RSS First Step capsule; the others were his financier brother, Mark; aviation legend and Mercury 13 veteran Wally Funk; and 18-year-old Oliver Daemen, the son of the second-highest bidder on the Blue Origin seat auction. (The $28 million dollar winner postponed his seat due to scheduling conflicts.)

The company now joins a very tiny circle of companies that have sent private citizens to space, in the biggest boost yet for the nascent space tourism industry. Tuesday also marks the 52nd anniversary of the Apollo 11 moon landing, the next step in space travel paying homage to the very first.

The press conference opened with the grinning foursome being pinned with astronaut ‘wings,’ a badge traditionally granted to those that have gone to space. “I’m so happy,” said Bezos at the press conference, donning the same cream cowboy hat he wore moments after emerging from the capsule a little over two hours earlier.

Bezos also thanked the city of Van Horn, acknowledging Blue Origin has made “a dent in it,” and followed by thanking every Amazon employee, plus its millions of customers: “Seriously, you paid for this.”

They also showed a brief video of the four crew members cavorting in four minutes of microgravity, including footage of the crew members catching floating Skittles in their mouths.

This is the second suborbital mission crewed entirely by private citizens this month alone, a first in history. The first was accomplished by Virgin Galactic’s VSS Unity, a rocket-powered spaceplane, on July 11; its founder, billionaire Richard Branson, was aboard, which helped foment a truly petty spat between the two ultra-wealthy founders. That aside, the two flights have helped make space tourism more of a reality than ever before.

The flight will also likely be a boost for Blue Origin’s commercial heavy-lift rocket launch arm, which for the moment is largely occupied by Elon Musk’s SpaceX. The same technologies that are used to perfect New Shepard’s reusability could come in handy for the development of New Glenn, the company’s massive orbital launch. Bezos said in February that the company was pushing the inaugural launch of New Glenn from late 2021 to the latter quarter of 2022.

Image Credits: Blue Origin / YouTube

“The fact of the matter is, the architecture and the technology we’ve chosen is complete over-kill” for space tourism, Bezos said. Instead, Blue Origin chose it “because it scales […]  the whole point of this is to get practice” for larger and heavier missions.

On why Blue Origin chose liquid fuel, he reiterated that it’s practice for future launches. “Every time we fly this tourism mission, we practice flying the second stage of New Glenn.”

In December 2020, NASA added Blue Origin to its roster of space companies eligible to compete for contracts under its Launch Services II program. While it doesn’t guarantee that New Glenn or any other Blue Origin rocket would be awarded a launch contract, it’s the first step to getting there.

Jeff Bezos confirmed that Blue Origin will fly two additional crewed launches this year alone, but it has yet to announce the price per seat. “We want the cadence to be very high […] We’re approaching $100 million in private sales already.” When asked how to get the cost per seat down, Bezos said the space tourism industry would follow the trajectory of commercial space travel, now widely used by millions of travelers each year.

At the end of the conference, Bezos announced he was starting a $100 million Courage and Civility Award, with CNN contributor Van Jones and Michelin star chef José Andrés as the first two recipients. The winner will give that money away to the charities of their choice. The award is for people who apparently demonstrate civility and resist ad hominem attacks. Reading between the lines (frankly, you don’t even really have to do that) it seems like a commentary on contemporary political discourse, especially the emphasis on civility in disagreement.

Looking to the future, the Amazon founder said he would split his time between Blue Origin and the Bezos Earth Fund, a $10 billion investment fund focused on climate change.

“This is not about escaping Earth. The whole point is, this is the only good planet in the solar system,” Bezos said. “We have to take care of it.”

Rewatch the press conference here:

News: The European VC market is so hot it may skip its summer holiday

• July 20, 2021
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Even though Europe has a reputation for lengthy summer vacations, investors don’t expect much — if any — slowdown to come in Europe during this sun-drenched quarter.

The startup market is having a moment around the world, but few regions can brag as much as Europe when it comes to venture capital investment. Yes, the United States is putting up impressive numbers and Indian startups are booming. But Europe is such a bright spot in the larger world of private startup investment that it deserves more solo attention.

The data coming out of the continent is staggering: According to a Dealroom report, some €49 billion was raised by European startups in the first six months of 2021. That’s 2.9x as much as was raised by the region’s technology upstarts in the first half of 2020, and easily crests previous full-year records set in 2020 and 2019.

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The epic start to 2021 for European startup fundraising crushes any preceding year that The Exchange has data for, erasing concerns that the continent simply won’t be able to create breakout tech companies that compete globally.

There are other signals that things are red-hot in Europe, including the recent direct listing of Wise on the London Stock Exchange. The company was valued at a huge $11 billion price when it did so.

Rapid investment and big exits are now the norm out of Europe. Naturally, we wanted to learn more about where venture dollars may point in the future. What follows is a synthesis of market data and notes from Diana Koziarska, a partner at SMOK Ventures; Vinoth Jayakumar, a partner at Draper Esprit; Simon Schmincke, a partner at Creandum; and Javier Santiso, a partner at Mundi Ventures.

The picture that emerges is one of sustained optimism, an expectation that venture investment is going to blast through traditional lulls and sustain a rapid-fire cadence during the rest of 2021. Records shall be smashed. But inside the various superlatives, a few sectors may do better than others. And Europe’s comparative gains in the venture capital world aren’t without impacts. Let’s explore what data says about the first half of 2021 in Europe’s startup market, and what its in-crowd expects for the rest of the year.

Inside Europe’s epic start to 2021

The European startup market is putting up notable results for both early-stage and super-late-stage funding. Dealroom reports that in the first half of 2021, some €18.1 billion was raised by European startups in the form of rounds greater than €250 million. For reference, the entire European startup market raised €16.7 billion in the first half of 2020.

But there’s also solid data indicating that Europe is doing a better job than ever in getting smaller companies off the ground. The same Dealroom report indicates that while Europe has created 15% of new global unicorns since 2020, it created 20% of new Series A-stage startups and a huge 35% of seed-stage tech upstarts.

China, in contrast, is the opposite; the country has 8% of new unicorns since 2020, 6% of Series A-stage startups and just 3% of the world’s seed-stage tech upstarts.

The interesting China dynamic is repeated in other statistics. Dealroom reports that Latin American venture capital is up 5.5x on a year-over-year basis in H1 2021. Asia excluding China is up 2.3x, as is investment in the United States. In China, a far smaller 1.6x growth rate was seen in the half-year period. But inside that data is the fact that every region we just listed set records in H1 2021, while China posted a figure that was sharply down from prior peak results.

This shows that regions that see a boom in investment can later see declines. But at least in the near term, that doesn’t seem to be in the cards.

News: 3 critical lessons I learned while scaling RingCentral’s customer support team

• July 20, 2021
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As you scale and onboard employees, make sure they know their importance — emphasize the stakes in their role related to the business and value that responsibility.

There are many things I wish I knew when starting out with my small customer support team at RingCentral, but in the end, we figured it out. I’m going to share some critical lessons I learned along the way that I wish I had known at the outset, so that when it comes to scaling your own support team, you’ll have an idea of what to expect.

When I first started with RingCentral, we were working with a small-scale support team undergoing rapid growth. Our main goal was to maintain an excellent level of customer service with smart operational decisions.

You have some choices when it comes to scaling up customer support:

• Increase your employee headcount to cover the increase in customers. This is an expensive option, and onboarding employees too quickly can result in lower-quality training that results in lower-quality customer service.
• Operate with a reduced staff and rely on decreased customer interaction. This increases wait times and can prove catastrophic to customer satisfaction.

But the real strategy to embrace, and the one we instituted at RingCentral, was investing in the employees we were onboarding and ensuring all our existing processes were running efficiently.

While automating processes and developing new strategies to address customer support is essential, building an efficient and empowered support team is the real key to scaling your customer support operation.

Hiring the right employees is critical. You want to find people with the right foundational skill sets and not necessarily the technical know-how to execute the job.

A foundational skill set combined with robust training enables employees to thrive with whatever is thrown at them, like adapting to remote support in the past year. An enabled employee can resolve support issues faster, making your whole operation more efficient. That’s a real win-win.

As you scale and onboard employees, make sure they know their importance — emphasize the stakes in their role related to the business and value that responsibility. We want our employees to feel engaged, so we offer them opportunities to pursue passion projects tied to business initiatives and the opportunity to shadow across different organizations.

As you adapt to growth by scaling your support team, you’ll develop operational elements and firm work streams that increase efficiency, enabling you to further grow without the need to hire additional support.

It’s been a team effort to get to where we are now, so keep that in mind as you plan your growth scaling. Your support team is your most important asset.

Lesson 1: Go beyond simplistic support

While it’s convenient to buy into the accepted truth that customer support consists of only two departments — inbound and outbound, at RingCentral, I encouraged diversity within our support teams.

With different skill sets come support agents who bring something unique to the table. While developing our support frontline, I soon learned that talents could be utilized in a query-specific function. By placing the support associate in the most suitable role, we increased job satisfaction for employees while remaining highly focused on the customer experience.

Here’s an overview of the teams we developed:

Professional services team

News: Facebook onboards another 31 newsletter writers on Bulletin

• July 20, 2021
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Late last month, Facebook announced Bulletin, its newsletter platform. Unlike Substack, Medium, and other competitors, Bulletin hand-picks its writers to curate a more controlled platform, with stars ranging from Mitch Albom, whose book Tuesdays With Morrie continues to break hearts in seventh grade English classes, to Queer Eye’s Tan France, who taught a generation of

Late last month, Facebook announced Bulletin, its newsletter platform. Unlike Substack, Medium, and other competitors, Bulletin hand-picks its writers to curate a more controlled platform, with stars ranging from Mitch Albom, whose book Tuesdays With Morrie continues to break hearts in seventh grade English classes, to Queer Eye’s Tan France, who taught a generation of young people how to perfect their French tuck. Today, Facebook announced its first new wave of newsletter writers after its initial beta launch.

This next wave of writers includes 24-year-old Nobel Peace Prize Malala Yousafzai, writing about “big debates and small moments; Maria Celeste, a Puerto Rican journalist who will write Bulletin’s first Spanish language newsletter; and Nedra Tawwab, a relationships therapist with millions of social media followers.

Bulletin boasts a breadth of free content and contains minimal Facebook branding — it’s hosted on its own separate website, not the Facebook app. But newsletter writers can choose what content to put behind a paywall, which readers purchase access to, of course, via Facebook Pay. Newsletter subscribers might also gain access to subscriber-only Facebook groups, Live Audio Rooms, and podcasts — so, Bulletin helps Facebook funnel subscribers into other products under its growing brand. But while Bulletin grows as a curated, invite-only platform for public figures that’s more exclusive than Raya, other platforms have struggled with the ethics of content moderation.

“We respect the work of writers and want to be clear that anyone who partners with us will have complete editorial independence,” Facebook wrote in a blog post after Bulletin’s launch. And, after reading comedian Greg Mania’s Bulletin-hosted essay about hemorrhoids, this statement feels accurate.

But when we talk about “editorial independence,” we’re not really talking about the ability to publish an essay called “My Date With the Rectal Surgeon.” With this statement, the company seemed to be nodding to the controversial “hands-off” approach that Substack has taken with its platform. Medium has dealt with a cultural reckoning of its own, too — the platform used to host in-house publications like GEN and Elemental, which were written and edited by trained journalists, but a pivot in the company’s vision effectively shut down editorial operations. So, Facebook’s investment in platforming (a select few) journalists and writers comes in direct opposition with the emphasis from Substack and Medium on user-generated content.

Facebook isn’t the only major social media platform that’s interested in newsletters — in January, Twitter acquired the newsletter platform Revue, but aside from some quiet updates, it seems like Twitter’s attention is focused elsewhere for now.

News: RxAll grabs $3.15M to scale its drug checking and counterfeiting tech across Africa

• July 20, 2021
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Research says that counterfeit medication is the cause of 1 million deaths per year. One-tenth of this number comes from Africa. Counterfeiting is hard to detect, investigate, quantify or stop. It is a global problem, with annual earnings from substandard drugs standing at over $100 billion. Some technologies have helped deal with this menace; for

Research says that counterfeit medication is the cause of 1 million deaths per year. One-tenth of this number comes from Africa. Counterfeiting is hard to detect, investigate, quantify or stop. It is a global problem, with annual earnings from substandard drugs standing at over $100 billion.

Some technologies have helped deal with this menace; for instance, radio frequency identification, which works by assigning serial numbers to containers of each product. More modern approaches are being adopted these days, which is the case of RxAll, a startup using deep technology to provide quality medication to patients. Today, the U.S. and Nigerian-based company is announcing a financing round of $3.15 million to scale across existing markets and improve its technology.

RxAll was founded in 2016 by Adebayo Alonge, Amy Kao and Wei Lui. As students at Yale University, the trio came together to collectively solve a problem they faced firsthand, either personally or relating to a loved one.

In 2006, Alonge was a victim of fake pharmaceuticals and almost died after taking medicine that contained lethal levels of diazepam. He went into a coma for three weeks.

“I survived a 21-day coma in Nigeria 15 years ago. My co-founder, Amy, was hospitalized in Thailand after taking counterfeit medicine. And Wei lost a family member due to contaminated drugs,” Alonge told TechCrunch over a call.

Based on an R&D project at the college’s chemistry department, Alonge, Kao, and Lui began to analyze how to use machine learning and molecular spectroscopy for drug quality and material and quality assurance. The big idea was to address the problem of poor access to high-quality medicine across Africa first, then the rest of the world by building a marketplace for authenticating the sale of safe and reputable pharmaceuticals.

“After going through that, information out there further confirmed that what we experienced wasn’t a one-off situation. It’s an ongoing problem; 100,000 Africans die from this problem every year. One million people die across the world from this problem,” CEO Alonge continued. 

Image Credits: RxAll

Its proprietary technology, RxScanner, is a handheld authenticator designed for patients to verify their drugs. According to the company, the RxScanner can identify the quality of prescription drugs in 20 seconds and display results in real-time via mobile apps.

RxAll curates high-quality sellers to its marketplace and provides them with the RxScanner. The machine learning model reads the sample spectra and send test results indicating the identity and the quality versus the reference. Sellers can be found by using the filter, and once the batch testing is done, the seller can push out the product into the marketplace and make it available for on-demand ordering, pick-up and deliveries as well.

The company makes money through commissions via transactions made on the marketplace. It also employs a subscription model with the RxScanner for individual and business customers.

Despite the company’s innovation, funding has been few and far between, as with many deep tech platforms with a significant focus on Africa. This is mainly due to the long cycle from research to commercialization of such ventures, so most VCs would instead get involved in the company’s later stages. So far, RxAll has stayed alive by winning grants and prize monies at competitions, with some equity financing from the likes of Africa-focused accelerator Founders Factory Africa.

Alonge sees RxAll as a pioneer in the world of deep tech mixed with health tech. He reckons there’s no direct competition with how the RxScanner operates, at least for the time being.

“In terms of pharmaceutical e-commerce, yes that’s a different ballgame. In terms of drug testing, the only other solutions out there are laboratory equipment, and they can be expensive. But in the space we play in, the application area, the price point, the way we’re going about it using deep learning and mobile phones, there’s no comparison,” the CEO said.

However, technological edge alone does not sell a product or run a business. With RxAll, the key to scaling its tech, according to Alonge is making its products affordable for the market despite the costs incurred. That’s a challenge the company is taking strides to tackle in addition to making its technology easier for investors to understand.

A part of the RxAll team

RxAll describes itself as a company playing in a global market. But as highlighted previously, a bulk of its customers and revenues come from Africa, especially Nigeria. It is currently serving ten cities and is actively validating the authenticity of drugs for 1 million patients while servicing over 2,000 hospitals and pharmacies in the West African nation. The company has plans to add an extra 14 cities before this year runs out, with a pan-African play set in motion for next year.

This financing round is a cumulation of a recently closed $2 million seed round (oversubscribed with $2.25 million) and a $900,000 pre-seed raised at the tail end of last year. Launch Africa led the round with participation from SOSV’s HAX and Keisuke Honda via his KSK fund.  

Speaking on the round, managing partner at Launch Africa Ventures Zachariah George said, “Launch Africa Ventures is excited to be co-leading this round of financing into a strong, experienced team at RxAll. We believe that RxAll is bridging a major gap in access to quality healthcare in Africa by pioneering a drug delivery platform to enable pharmacies and patients to buy authenticated medicines online. The ability to achieve favourable unit economics and multiple revenue streams by leveraging anti-counterfeiting mobile spectrometer technology, owning the entire drug delivery supply chain and their own payment wallet, provides a massive growth and scaling opportunity across Africa and beyond.”

Duncan Turner, general partner at SOSV and managing director of HAX added, “We’ve been incredibly impressed by RxAll’s ability to scale and meet customer demand. In just the last year, the team has brought together world-class hard tech and operational excellence to solve pressing issues for over a million Nigerians, and we couldn’t be more excited by their vision for the broader pharmaceutical market.”

So what’s next for RxAll? Alonge said the company’s next focus is on partnerships. According to him, they will be integral in RxAll’s push to scale its marketplace and scanner across Nigeria, Africa and the rest of the world.

“Asides from the hospitals, pharmacies and patients, we also sell to governments and country FDAs on the scanner side of things. So we’re looking to secure key partnerships globally, not just in Nigeria, but across Africa, Southeast Asia, North America and South America. Those are the key markets we’re looking to scale into.”

News: YouTube’s newest monetization tool lets viewers tip creators for their uploads

• July 20, 2021
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YouTube announced its latest feature, Super Thanks, on Tuesday. This is YouTube’s fourth Paid Digital Good, which is what the platform calls any product that lets fans directly pay creators. So far, these tools include Super Chat, Super Stickers, and channel subscriptions — but Super Thanks is YouTube’s first of these features that allows fans

YouTube announced its latest feature, Super Thanks, on Tuesday. This is YouTube’s fourth Paid Digital Good, which is what the platform calls any product that lets fans directly pay creators. So far, these tools include Super Chat, Super Stickers, and channel subscriptions — but Super Thanks is YouTube’s first of these features that allows fans to tip creators for individual uploaded videos, rather than livestreams.

If a viewer wants to show extra appreciation for a video, they can pay creators with one of four pre-set amounts, ranging between $2 and $50 in their local currency. When viewers buy Super Thanks, they can leave a message, which will appear highlighted in the comments section.

YouTube’s previous tools for direct payments to creators seemed like a way to play catch-up with Twitch, but the platform is now differentiating itself with Super Thanks. Even Instagram has features that let users tip creators when they go Live, like Badges, but lacks a way for creators to receive a one-time payment for a post or a reel. Instead, Instagram has pivoted hard to e-commerce, which feels like a less organic or direct way for fans to engage with creators than a product like Super Thanks.

Image Credits: YouTube

Last year was YouTube’s biggest for Paid Digital Goods — in 2020, over 10 million users purchased either a Super Chat, Super Sticker, or channel subscription for the first time on the platform. The number of channels that earned a majority of their revenue from these products in 2020 was more than 3x in 2019.

“In my spare time, I’m a YouTube creator,” said Barbara Macdonald, YouTube’s Product Manager for Paid Digital Goods. “I’m fortunate enough that my insights as a creator have been able to help myself and my team create better products for our users on YouTube.”

Since 2019, Macdonald and her team have been working with a group of YouTube creators to pilot this feature, originally called “applause,” as beta testers. These creators provided feedback and suggestions on the product, which YouTube took into consideration — they suggested changing the name from “applause,” adding higher pricing options to maximize revenue potential, and differentiating a Super Thanks message from other comments. YouTube takes 30% of revenue from fans’ payments to creators, while competitor Twitch takes 50% of streamers’ subscription revenue.

Starting today, Super Thanks functionality will expand to thousands creators of creators in 68 countries who are members of the YouTube Partner Program. The expansion is randomized, Macdonald told TechCrunch, but will roll out to all eligible creators in the YouTube Partner Program by the end of this year.

So now, maybe instead of YouTubers ending each video with a reminder to “like, comment, and subscribe,” it’ll be, “like, comment, subscribe, and Super Thanks.” 

News: HBO Max to stream free episodes inside Snapchat for co-watching with friends

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In a bid to boost sign-ups to its streaming service, HBO Max is partnering with Snap to bring free episodes from its original programing to Snapchat users in the U.S. The episodes will stream via a Snap Mini — the company’s bite-sized third-party apps that live within Snapchat. The experience will offer users a way

In a bid to boost sign-ups to its streaming service, HBO Max is partnering with Snap to bring free episodes from its original programing to Snapchat users in the U.S. The episodes will stream via a Snap Mini — the company’s bite-sized third-party apps that live within Snapchat. The experience will offer users a way to watch top titles, including both new releases like the rebooted “Gossip Girl” as well as fan favorites like “Game of Thrones,” among others, while chatting with friends.

To use the feature, Snapchat users will launch the HBO Max Mini experience through the rocket icon that appears within Chat or through Search. Viewers are then required to enter their birthdate to access a curated collection of age-appropriate episodes.

But what makes the experience more interesting than just being another way to stream TV on your phone are the interactive elements the Snap Mini experience provides. Users can invite up to 63 other Snapchat friends to co-watch the shows with them by sending an in-chat message with a link to join the Snap Mini or by sending a clickable sticker link using Snapchat’s camera. When others join the Mini, their playback will sync up with their friends’ viewing, and they’ll be able to chat as they watch and share Bitmoji reactions with one another. (Separately, Snapchat just announced an upgraded Bitmoji experience involving 3D Bitmoji, but this is focused on users’ profiles.)

Co-watching experiences had become popular last year during the pandemic, as family and friends remained apart under Covid lockdown measures. Since users couldn’t be together in-person, they connected online to watch TV and movies with their loved ones, via third-party extensions like Netflix Party and other services. Some streamers, including Amazon Prime Video and Hulu, even built co-watching tools directly into their platforms. HBO Max, meanwhile, worked with browser extension maker Scener to make co-watching possible.

With its Snap Mini, HBO Max is now offering another way for friends to socialize online around favorite shows, where it’s not just about chatting inside the streamers’ own app, but instead about using a co-watching experience to drive sign-ups for the paid subscription.

According to HBO Max’s owner, WarnerMedia, the plan will be to use the Snap Mini to entice users to subscribe by presenting the option to go to HBO Max after the episode wraps so they can continue watching the series. (This will only be shown to users 18 and up, the company says).

In addition, the Snap Mini experience allows users to sample some of HBO Max’s content before committing to becoming a paid subscriber, as an alternative to a free trial where users tend to have to enter their payment card information.

The available titles will be refreshed on an ongoing basis. But for now, the first episode from a number of HBO Max shows will be offered, including “Craftopia,” “Euphoria,” “The Flight Attendant,” “Game of Thrones,” “Genera+ion,” “Gossip Girl” (2021), “Looney Tunes,” “Love Life,” “Lovecraft Country,” “Selena + Chef,” “Titans,” “Warrior,” and “World of Calm.” The lineup will also include Episode 1 of the second season of “Betty.”

“People love to come together to watch their favorite HBO Max shows and talk about what’s unfolding,” said said HBO Max EVP, DTC Global Product Management, Sarah Lyons. “Our partnership with Snapchat is another step towards fulfilling that desire for human connection and providing our fans with co-viewing opportunities, while deepening their emotional relationship with the brand. We believe humans value recommendations that come from other humans, so having the opportunity for friends to suggest, and then subsequently watch content together paves the way for more meaningful discovery,” she added.

News: ChargePoint to buy European charging software startup for $295M

• July 20, 2021
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ChargePoint struck a deal to buy European charging software company has.to.be for €250 million ($295 million) in cash and stock, the electric vehicle charging network’s first acquisition since it became a publicly traded company. Through the deal, ChargePoint gains more than just 125 employees and the company’s operating software, which manages more than 40,000 networked

ChargePoint struck a deal to buy European charging software company has.to.be for €250 million ($295 million) in cash and stock, the electric vehicle charging network’s first acquisition since it became a publicly traded company.

Through the deal, ChargePoint gains more than just 125 employees and the company’s operating software, which manages more than 40,000 networked ports in Europe. The acquisition will give ChargePoint a boost in its pursuit to gain market share beyond North America and VW Group as a strategic partner.

VW Group was an early investor in has.to.be, which was founded in 2013, and will continue a relationship with ChargePoint along with other customers of the software company such as Ionity, Audi, Porsche, BP, Total, Lidl and GP Joule. ChargePopint will also add has.to.be offices in Munich, Salzburg and Vienna to its operations. 

ChargePoint designs, develops and manufactures hardware and accompanying software, as well as a cloud subscription platform, for electric vehicles. The company might be best-known for its branded public and semi-public charging spots that consumers use to charge their personal electric cars and SUVs, as well as its home chargers. However, ChargePoint also has a commercial-focused business that provides hardware and software to help fleet operators manage their delivery vans, buses and cars.

In all, the company has more than 115,000 charging spots globally. ChargePoint also offers access to an additional 133,000 public places to charge through network roaming integrations across North America and Europe.

“Our continued investment in Europe is critical to our stated growth strategy,” ChargePoint President and CEO Pasquale Romano said in a statement, later adding that the companies combined assets “should position us to accelerate our leadership as electrification continues to take hold across continents.”

ChargePoint agreed in September to merge with special-purpose acquisition company Switchback Energy Acquisition Corporation, with a market valuation of $2.4 billion. ChargePoint was able to raise $225 million in private investment in public equity, or PIPE, led by institutional investors including Baillie Gifford and funds managed by Neuberger Berman Alternatives Advisors.

ChargePoint said at the time that it planned to use the new capital to expand in North America and Europe, improve its technology portfolio and significantly scale its commercial, fleet and residential businesses.

News: China Roundup: What’s going on with China’s data security clampdown?

• July 20, 2021
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Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world. A tectonic shift is underway in how Beijing regulates and accesses the troves of citizen data collected by its tech giants. More details of China’s new

Hello and welcome back to TechCrunch’s China Roundup, a digest of recent events shaping the Chinese tech landscape and what they mean to people in the rest of the world.

A tectonic shift is underway in how Beijing regulates and accesses the troves of citizen data collected by its tech giants. More details of China’s new cybersecurity rules have recently come to light as Didi, the SoftBank-backed ride-sharing dominator in China, became the target of the Chinese government’s latest effort to heighten data protection. This week, we look at what this changing landscape means to Chinese tech firms wooing investors in the United States.

Data sovereignty

The new wave of discussion around China’s cybersecurity rules started with the bombshell dropped on Didi. Just two days after its $4 billion IPO in New York, the ride-hailing giant was hit with a probe by China’s Cybersecurity Review Office on July 2. Two days later, the same government agency ordered the Didi app, which has amassed nearly 500 million annual users, to be yanked because it was “illegally collecting user data.”

The Cybersecurity Review Office is an agency within the Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s top internet regulator. It has existed for a few years but its roles were only made clear in April 2020 when China put forward its rules on internet security reviews.

Didi appears to be the first target of the department’s enforcement actions. A memo of an “expert meeting” shared among Didi’s investors, which TechCrunch reviewed, said the ride-hailing firm had failed to assure Beijing its data practices were secure before going public in New York. A major concern was that Didi’s data, if unguarded by Chinese laws, could be subject to scrutiny by U.S. regulators. But a Didi executive claimed that the firm stored all its China data locally and it is “absolutely not possible” that it passed data to the U.S.

Before long, the Cybersecurity Review Office was onto other players that could similarly compromise the data security of Chinese users. On July 5, it put SoftBank-backed truck-sharing platform Full Truck Alliance and recruiting site Boss Zhipin — both of which recently IPO’ed in the U.S. — under the same review process as it did with Didi.

The probes were just the beginning. On July 10, the Cybersecurity Review Office unveiled the draft of a revised version of the data security review rules passed last year. One of the major changes is that any business commanding over one million users is subject to security checks if it is seeking an overseas IPO.

Just as the U.S. government frets over Chinese companies commanding Americans’ data, as in the case of TikTok, China is now making sure that its citizen data stays onshore and protected from U.S. authorities. Foreign players operating in China have to comply, too. Giants like Apple and Tesla have pledged and moved to store their Chinese user data within the country.

The new data rule is no doubt a stumbling block for Chinese companies that want to list abroad. TikTok owner ByteDance indefinitely put on hold its plans of a U.S. listing after Chinese officials told it to address data security risks, according to a report by The Wall Street Journal. But how about incumbents like Alibaba that have traded their stocks on Wall Street for years? And do the revised rules apply to companies listing in Hong Kong, which is being increasingly integrated with mainland China?

Also in the news

• Tencent and Alibaba may tear down their “walled gardens.” According to The Wall Street Journal, the archrivals are considering opening their services to each other. This means users may be able to pay via Alipay on the WeChat app, which currently excludes Alibaba-affiliated Alipay. China has recently been working to rein in its tech darlings and already slapped anticompetition penalties on a cohort of tech firms. Jack Ma’s fintech behemoth Ant Group has been put on the spot and forced to restructure into a financial holding company that would potentially curb its profitability and subject it to more regulatory oversight.
• TikTok tops 3 billion downloads from the App Store and Google Play, according to Sensor Tower. This makes the hit video platform the only app not owned by Facebook to cross the milestone across the two app stores, said the research firm, and it’s only the fifth one after WhatsApp, Messenger, Facebook and Instagram to achieve that. TikTok is also generating big bucks for ByteDance. Globally, it has made more than $2.5 billion in consumer spending since its launch.
• Tencent ups its stake in food delivery giant Meituan to 17.2%. The deal cost Tencent, a longtime patron of Meituan, $400 million. The proceeds will allow Meituan to invest further in “cutting edge tech” such as unmanned delivery cars and drones, an area where other tech firms have also made similar promises to automate parcel and food deliveries.
• The smart vehicle craze continues. These days, hardly a week goes by without a major announcement by an autonomous driving or smart car company in China. The news last week came from Banma, which was set up by Alibaba and state-owned carmaker SAIC Motor to make internet-connected cars. It just raised $460 million from Alibaba and SAIC Motor, among others and claimed its technology now serves three million users. It raised its first round in 2018 with 1.6 billion yuan (around $250 million) and was already valued at over $1 billion at the time.

News: Titan, a platform aimed at the ‘everyday investor,’ valued at $450M as a16z leads $58M Series B

• July 20, 2021
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Titan, a startup that is building a retail investment management platform aimed at the new generation of “everyday investors,” has closed on $58 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z). The financing comes just over five months after Titan raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by General Catalyst,

Titan, a startup that is building a retail investment management platform aimed at the new generation of “everyday investors,” has closed on $58 million in a Series B round led by Andreessen Horowitz (a16z).

The financing comes just over five months after Titan raised $12.5 million in a Series A round led by General Catalyst, and brings the startup’s total raised since its 2017 inception to $75 million. It values the company at $450 million.

General Catalyst also put money in the Series B round, along with BoxGroup, Ashton Kutcher’s Sound Ventures and a group of professional athletes and celebrities including Odell Beckham Jr., Kevin Durant, Jared Leto and Will Smith. 

The startup, which describes itself as “a new-guard active investment manager,“ launched its first investment strategy in February of 2018 and today has 30,000 users. Titan’s platform grew by 500% in the last 12 months, largely organically, according to the company, which expects to cross its first billion in assets under management later this year. At the time of its last raise in February, Titan co-founder and co-CEO Joe Percoco said the startup was approaching $500 million in assets under management and was cash flow positive last year. 

“What Fidelity and its iconic mutual funds were for baby boomers, Titan is for new generations. Titan is the first DTC, mobile-first investment platform where everyday investors, irrespective of wealth, can have their capital actively managed by investment experts in long-term strategies,” Percoco said.

He went on to describe the mutual fund or an ETF as “fundamentally just a piece of technology for an investment manager to accept money from someone in order to invest in securities.” He likened that piece of technology to a VHS tape that “does the job, but is archaic for a few reasons.” Those reasons, he said, are that the investor is an “anonymized dollar value” and the products have layers of costs with high minimums and are difficult to create.

“The factory that creates the mutual fund itself is very old. The entire investment management industry is predicated on these VHS tapes,” Percoco said. “These are the archaic technologies being used. We’re rebuilding it entirely. Fidelity is an old factory. Titan is effectively a new factory.”

Image credits: Titan

On August 3, Titan plans to launch its cryptocurrency offering, which the company claims will be the first and only actively managed portfolio of cryptocurrency assets available to U.S. investors. At launch, Titan Crypto will be available to all U.S. residents except those with home addresses in New  York. Access for NY-based residents will be provided once Titan’s custodial partner receives regulatory approval for the state’s jurisdiction. 

Looking ahead, Titan said it plans to allow other investment managers to launch their products from its “factory.”

“The initial strategies on Titan’s platform are predominantly in stocks,” Percoco said. “We’re already getting in-bounds from multibillion-dollar managers asking to launch products on Titan.”

The company plans to use its new capital toward continuing to build out its underlying platform and suite of investment products as well as hiring. It currently has about 30 employees, up from seven a year ago. Percoco expects that Titan will have 100 employees by this time next year.

A16z general partner Anish Acharya said that since meeting the Titan team last year, his firm has “consistently been impressed” by Titan’s product vision, execution and team.

“If we pull back and look at trends happening in consumer investing, we can see that younger generations are embracing more risk in investing, that they demand easy to navigate, mobile-first interfaces and transparency from their banks, and that they want to deeply understand how their money is being invested and participate in the learnings from that process,” said Acharya, who will be joining Titan’s board as part of the financing.

In his view, Titan sits at an “interesting intersection” between passive robo-advisors and active stock-pricing, “allowing their customers to ride shotgun alongside some of the best fund managers in the world, thus achieving the returns and knowledge of stock picking without having to make the decisions themselves.”