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News: Motional reveals its Hyundai Ioniq 5 electric robotaxi

• August 31, 2021
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Motional revealed Tuesday the first images of its planned robotaxi, a Hyundai all-electric Ioniq 5 SUV that will be the centerpiece of a driverless ride-hailing service the company wants customers to be able to access starting in 2023 through the Lyft app. The purpose-built vehicle, which will be assembled by Hyundai, is integrated with Motional’s

Motional revealed Tuesday the first images of its planned robotaxi, a Hyundai all-electric Ioniq 5 SUV that will be the centerpiece of a driverless ride-hailing service the company wants customers to be able to access starting in 2023 through the Lyft app.

The purpose-built vehicle, which will be assembled by Hyundai, is integrated with Motional’s autonomous vehicle technology, including a suite of more than 30 sensors including lidar, radar and cameras that can be seen throughout the interior and exterior. That sensing system provides 360 degrees of vision, and the ability to see up to 300 meters away, according to Motional.

The company, which was born out of a $4 billion joint venture with Aptiv and Hyundai, intentionally showcases the numerous sensors, president and CEO Karl Iagnemma said in a recent interview.

“We see so many competitors bending over backwards to try to hide this sensor suite and conceal it in these big plastic casings,” Iagnemma told TechCrunch. “And the fact is, you can’t hide the sensors. They need to be where they need to be and they’re an important part of the car and a key part of the technology. So our strategy was to celebrate the sensors, and to adapt the design language of the vehicle and carry that through the design of the integrated sensor suite.”

Motional has not announced where it will launch its first driverless robotaxi service. It’s likely that it will be in one of the cities it currently is testing and validating its technology, a list that includes Boston, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Pittsburgh.

Image credit: Motional

The base of Motional’s robotaxi is the Hyundai Ioniq 5, an electric vehicle revealed in February with a consumer release date expected later this year. The consumer version will not be equipped with Motional’s autonomous vehicle technology. Unlike some AV developers, Motional didn’t chose a  shuttle design or even a larger van for its first robotaxi.

Iagnemma said that the company’s research shows the vast majority of taxi or ride-hailing trips are for two or fewer passengers. The Ioniq 5 is the right size vehicle for Motional’s use case, he added.

The Hyundai Ioniq 5 is the first vehicle based off the automaker’s dedicated battery electric vehicle platform called the Electric Global Modular Platform (E-GMP). The vehicle — both the consumer and robotaxi version — is equipped with an 800-volt electrical system. This higher voltage system is able to supply the same amount of power as the more common 400-volt with less current. The 800-volt system, which debuted in the all-electric Porsche Taycan, is lighter, more efficient and allows the vehicle to charge at a faster rate.

That fast charging rate will be an important benefit for Motional’s robotaxi service.

Image Credits: Motional

The robotaxi version of the Ioniq 5 will be assembled by Hyundai, a noteworthy detail, Iagnemma said.

“This is vehicle that will come off the assembly line looking, as you see it in the pictures,” Iagnemma said. “This is not a scenario where we’ll take a base vehicle, move it to a different line, take the components off and then reintegrate or retrofit it.

Inside the robotaxi are displays to allow riders to interact with the vehicle during their ride, such as directing the robotaxi to make an extra stop, according to the company.

The robotaxi still has a steering wheel and other features found in traditional vehicles operated by a human driver. Riders will not be permitted to sit in the driver seat.

News: Prosus acquires Indian payments giant BillDesk for $4.7B, will merge with its PayU fintech group

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More major consolidation underway in the world of payments: Prosus — the Dutch tech giant that bundles together Naspers’ fintech, e-commerce and other international investments and businesses outside of South Africa (including a big stake in Tencent) — today announced that it would pay $4.7 billion to acquire BillDesk, a payments provider out of India.

More major consolidation underway in the world of payments: Prosus — the Dutch tech giant that bundles together Naspers’ fintech, e-commerce and other international investments and businesses outside of South Africa (including a big stake in Tencent) — today announced that it would pay $4.7 billion to acquire BillDesk, a payments provider out of India. Prosus plans to combine BillDesk with PayU, its existing global fintech and payments business, which already has a strong presence in India. The deal has been rumored to be in the works since about July.

The acquisition will make PayU one of the bigger online payment providers globally with some $147 billion in payment volume annually. But the acquisition is not only a significant consolidation move in the world of payments: it also underscores Prosus’ continuing focus on developing markets and specifically India. Prosus said that the deal — one of the biggest ever made by Prosus, and one of the biggest M&A moves in India — will give its fintech holdings in India a cumulative investment value of $10 billion.

That is part of a long-term strategy for Prosus (and Naspers) that stretches back nearly a decade involving a number of other acquisitions and investments in startups in the region.

“Payments and fintech is a core segment for Prosus and India remains our number one investment destination,” said Bob van Dijk, group CEO of Prosus, in a statement. PayU — formed out a combination of various interests in fintech and payments that Naspers (and then Prosus) had acquired over several years, is currently active in some 20 markets.

India represents a huge market for financial services, with a digitally-savvy consumer base with a rapidly expanding middle class with disposable income.

Within that, PayU has positioned itself as a strong player. Specifically, it has been highly competitive in the Indian online merchant acquiring market – both on price and in-field sales effort. PayU India has a dominant share in the payments gateway business where it traditionally competed with BillDesk and CCAvenue (owned in part by Infibeam).

BillDesk has been around since 2000 and its investors had included Visa, General Atlantic, and the State Bank of India. PitchBook estimated that its valuation was around $1.53 billion in 2019 when it last raised money. Tracxn estimated that the founders still owned just under 30% of the company ahead of this acquisition.

BillDesk is among the firms that has applied for the license of NUE, a new retail payments networks proposed for India that is expected to compete with established UPI railroads. BillDesk has teamed with Amazon, ICICI Bank, Axis Bank, Pine Labs, and Visa for the license.

“We believe this transaction will stimulate both innovation and competition within India’s digital payments industry,” said Laurent Le Moal, CEO of PayU, in a statement. “This will not only help to strengthen India’s digital economy, but also bring financial services to those who may have historically been excluded. This ambition is fully aligned with the Government of India’s vision of ‘Digital India’ and is a key objective for PayU across all the communities we serve globally.”

PayU today said that its domestic and cross-border payments business as of March 2021 was up 51% year-on-year across its operations in India, Latin America and EMEA, a mark of the overall boom that we have seen in the global digital payments market in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Other businesses PayU operates include credit solutions across India and five other markets. Prosus itself is also an active investor, with stakes in remittance company Remitly and others — representing a pipeline for strategic partnerships, but also potentially future acquisitions.

News: Dance launches its e-bike subscription service in Berlin

• August 31, 2021
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German startup Dance is launching its subscription service in its hometown Berlin. For a flat monthly fee of €79 (around $93 at today’s exchange rate), users will get a custom-designed electric bike as well as access to an on-demand repair and maintenance service. Founded by the former founders of SoundCloud and Jimdo, the company managed

German startup Dance is launching its subscription service in its hometown Berlin. For a flat monthly fee of €79 (around $93 at today’s exchange rate), users will get a custom-designed electric bike as well as access to an on-demand repair and maintenance service.

Founded by the former founders of SoundCloud and Jimdo, the company managed to raise some significant funding before launching its service. BlueYard led the startup’s seed round while HV Capital (formerly known as HV Holtzbrinck Ventures) led Dance’s €15 million Series A round, which represented $17.7 million at the time.

The reason why Dance needed so much capital is that the company has designed its own e-bike internally. Called the Dance One, it features an aluminum frame and weighs around 22kg (48.5lb). It has a single speed and it relies on its electric motor to help you go from 0 to 25kmph.

And the best part is that you can remove the lithium battery and plug it at home — something that is desperately lacking in VanMoof’s e-bikes. This way, you don’t have to carry your entire bike up the stairs. People living in apartments will appreciate that feature. Users can expect to charge the battery after riding for 55km.

Image Credits: Dance

The Dance One uses a carbon belt so that it doesn’t require much maintenance. At the front of the bike, there’s an integrated smartphone mount that should be compatible with popular cases designed for this type of mounts. You can control the level of electric assistance with buttons of the handlebar. There are three different modes: high assistance, low assistance or no assistance at all.

The bike comes with a front and rear lights that you can activate with a button as well. When it comes to brakes, Dance has opted for hydraulic discs. You can optionally add a basket or saddle bags at the back of the bike.

Like other popular e-bikes from VanMoof or Cowboy, you can lock and unlock the Dance bike from a mobile app. The company has integrated GPS and Bluetooth chips in the frame of the bike. Of course, you should also use a traditional lock in addition to the smart lock.

On paper, it looks like a nice e-bike for city rides. Users will have to pay €79 per month to get access to a bike. There are no time commitment or upfront fees. If you want to subscribe just for the summer, you can do that. If you have an issue with your bike, the company will send a mechanic to fix it for you.

Dance has been trying out the service with hundreds of beta users and “thousands” of bikes are now available for new users. While the company is focusing on Berlin for now, it plans to expand to other German and European cities in the future.

Dance will compete with a handful of other services around Europe, such as Swapfiets, or Véligo in Paris. It’ll also indirectly compete with on-demand shared bikes, such as Lime and all the various city-led public-private bike-sharing services around Europe. And of course, some people will end up buying their own e-bike.

But Dance seems like a well-designed offering with a nice-looking bike and a lot of flexibility for the end user. I’m sure the startup will have no issue finding customers who are looking for a seamless end-to-end experience.

Image Credits: Dance

News: This Sequoia- and Henry Kravis-backed prediction market wants to turn opinions into money

• August 31, 2021
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More than 15 years ago, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which was acquired by Nasdaq in 2008, and another since-sold exchange called HedgeStreet, both announced they intended to offer something called event contracts to investors. The idea was to allow people to bet “yes” or “no” on questions about future events that were structured as all-or-nothing

More than 15 years ago, the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, which was acquired by Nasdaq in 2008, and another since-sold exchange called HedgeStreet, both announced they intended to offer something called event contracts to investors. The idea was to allow people to bet “yes” or “no” on questions about future events that were structured as all-or-nothing options, and to pay a fixed amount when an outcome either occurred or did not.

At the time, it was a novel but controversial idea; it also failed to generate enough interest from investors to succeed. Now, Kalshi, a young, New York-based, 33-person startup is testing the waters anew and it’s doing so with the help of some heavyweight investors that include Sequoia Capital, Henry Kravis, Charles Schwab and SV Angel that have collectively provided the company with $36 million in funding to date.

Their enthusiasm ties in part to a major hurdle that Kalshi — founded by former MIT classmates and researchers Tarek Mansour and Luana Lopes Lara — overcame last year by winning approval from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission to run a derivatives exchange.

Mansour says Kalshi’s small team worked closely with the agency at every turn to ensure it would pass muster. “This was quite the process, as the more problems you face, the more problems emerge,” he says now of the process. Bringing aboard a former head of clearing at the CFTC as Kalshi’s head of regulation also helped, he says.

Kalshi is also emerging during a time when people are consuming more, and sometimes narrower, news stories through their social media feeds and elsewhere.

That matters, suggests Lopes Lara, because the “contracts are pretty much tied to news and things that are going on in the world and relevant in the world right now.” Indeed, though a tie-up with a social media platform would probably be ideal, one way the startup is getting in front of information junkies is advertising on the question-and-answer site Quora. (Other, more “partnership-based” tie-ups are coming, add the founders.)

In the meantime, Kalshi is on a mission to prove it can entice a new generation of traders — both retail and institutional, accredited and unaccredited — to bet on all kinds of possible outcomes, like whether or not Turkey will join the European Union by June of next year, which is one contract on the platform currently.

Kalshi — which has a clearinghouse partner that holds the funds from all users to ensure that every contract is collateralized —  is seeing some traction. Since launching in March, the platform has attracted 4,000 users who have agreed to its “yes” or “no” contracts that have just two outcomes and that pay either 100% if an investor bets correctly and zilch if the investor bets wrong. It’s a respectable but conservative amount of users.

The founders suggest things will begin to pick up at a faster clip this fall, given that Kalshi has a “few avenues for acquiring users and growing our user base,” says Mansour.

One if these is the consumer product that people have so far been experimenting with and which is available to anyone who wants to enter into a contract at its website.

More impactful, potentially, Kalshi also has “a few brokers that we’re going to partner with . . . to allow people to trade event contracts the same way they trade stocks, or commodities, or options on their preferred brokerage app,” says Mansour, adding that “by brokers, I mean the Fidelities and Charles Schwabs of the world.”

Adds Lopes Lara, “People who use Robinhood or Coinbase or other brokers are our first target, given how much they already understand about investing and are interested in these types of questions and event-based thinking for their investments.”

What interested parties should know not to expect are event contracts around sports outcomes (“that’s very much like gambling, and we don’t [facilitate] that,” says Lopes Lara.)

Owing to federal regulations, certain other areas are also very much off limits, including events contracts tied to geopolitical events, like whether a war will breakout, and political events. (For example, though users might be tempted to bet on whether or not California Governor Gavin Newsom will be recalled in September, they’d have to drum up that action elsewhere.)

As for what happens if Kalshi takes off  and other brokerages or other large financial institutions attempt to create their own event contract offerings, Mansour insists that it wouldn’t be so easy for them. “A lot of the work that we’ve done over the last two-and-a-half years is [intellectual property]. Every single detail of operations was built for event contracts. It would take a bit of time — especially for some of these bigger institutions — to really get into the space.”

Only time will tell.

Other investors in Kalshi include Y Combinator and Tinder cofounder Justin Mateen.

Alfred Lin of Sequoia Capital sits on the company’s board.

News: Coral Capital closes third fund with $128M for startups in Japan

• August 31, 2021
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Coral Capital, a Tokyo-based venture capital firm, announced today that it has closed its third fund, Coral Capital III, raising $128 million (14 billion yen). Coral Capital’s total assets under management (AUM) is now $275 million. Limited partners in the vehicle include Mizuho Bank, Mitsubishi Estate, Shinsei Bank, Pavilion Capital, Founders Found, Dai-ichi Life Insurance,

Coral Capital, a Tokyo-based venture capital firm, announced today that it has closed its third fund, Coral Capital III, raising $128 million (14 billion yen). Coral Capital’s total assets under management (AUM) is now $275 million.

Limited partners in the vehicle include Mizuho Bank, Mitsubishi Estate, Shinsei Bank, Pavilion Capital, Founders Found, Dai-ichi Life Insurance, GREE, and undisclosed domestic and international institutional investors.

Coral Capital, founded by two partners James Riney and Yohei Sawayama, will continue to invest in seed and early-stage companies in Japan, deploying first checks from $500,000 to $5 million, and follow-on funding, CEO and founding partner Riney told TechCrunch.

“We have made a few large follow-on investments – $20 million into SmartHR and $17 million into Graffer. we also allocated a significant portion of our latest fund for follow-on investment,” Riney said. About 30% of its third fund is from global investors including the US, Asia and Europe, and Coral Capital wants to be a bridge between its Japan-based portfolio companies and global venture capital community for reaching international scale, Riney continued.

What makes the latest fund unique is that it has a longer fund life that can be extended to 14 years, Riney said. “We want our founders to focus on building without the pressure of a VC looking for a quick exit,” Riney told TechCrunch. Its previous two funds had about 10 years of fund life, Riney noted.

Riney and Sawayama, who were co-founders of 500 Startups Japan, launched their first fund in partnership with 500 Startups in February 2016. Coral Capital has set up its $45 million second fund, Capital Fund II under their own brand name, in February 2019.

Coral Capital has invested in over 80 companies in Japan and exited 7 companies so far, according to Riney. It has made a raft of investments including SmartHR, Graffer, GITAI, and Kyoto Fusioneering.

The company will focus on investing digital transformation in areas including SaaS, insurance, fintech, healthcare, deep tech, fusion engineering companies, robotic companies, Riney told TechCrunch.

The Japanese startup ecosystem is striking its stride now compared to 9 years ago, Riney said. As Riney and Sawayama started investing in seed and early-stage startup companies back in 2012, the startup world was a black box in the country, according to Riney. There was less than a billion invested into startups every year and hardly any unicorns in Japan, and there was not enough information available in Japanese on building companies, he said.

Many startups in Japan are now forgoing an early IPO and raising larger amounts in later stage rounds, Riney said.

Japan’s annual startup investment is estimated at $5 billion, with six unicorns including Coral Capital’s portfolio company, up from just about $600 million in 2012. The $5 billion in annual startup investment is nothing when you consider that the U.S. and China attract tens of billions, and even neighboring country Korea attracts about $4 billion and produced Coupang, a decacorn, Riney said.  “We can do better, and we will” and Coral Capital will continue to support and play an important role in driving the ecosystem forward in Japan, Riney added.

Coral Capital also plans to double down on its media outlet, Coral Insights, and recruit staff for building its community. Many startup founders, employees, and investors publish content on their learnings, raising the bar for everyone in the ecosystem and Japan is starting to look a lot more like Silicon Valley, Riney said.

News: Southeast Asia “omnichannel” health startup Doctor Anywhere gets $88M SGD

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Doctor Anywhere, a startup that takes an “omnichannel” approach to healthcare, announced today it has raised $88 million SGD (about $65.7 million USD) in Series C funding. The round was led by Asia Partners, with participation from Novo Holdings, Philips and OSK-SBI Partners. It also included returning investors EDBI, Square Peg, IHH Healthcare, Kamet Capital

Doctor Anywhere, a startup that takes an “omnichannel” approach to healthcare, announced today it has raised $88 million SGD (about $65.7 million USD) in Series C funding. The round was led by Asia Partners, with participation from Novo Holdings, Philips and OSK-SBI Partners. It also included returning investors EDBI, Square Peg, IHH Healthcare, Kamet Capital and Pavilion Capital. 

As part of the round, Asia Partners co-founder Oliver Rippel and Novo Holdings Equity Asia senior partner Dr. Amit Kakar will join Doctor Anywhere’s board of directors. The company’s Series C, which it claims is one of the largest private rounds raised by a Southeast Asian healthtech company, brings its total funding to more than $140 million SGD. 

Doctor Anywhere’s omnichannel approach means that in addition to online consultations, it runs in-person clinics, provides home visits, medication deliveries and operates an in-app marketplace for health and wellness products. 

Founded in 2017 by Lim Wai Mun, Doctor Anywhere claims it now serves more than 1.5 million users. It is available in Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam and the Philippines, and recently established tech hubs in Bangalore and Ho Chi Minh City. 

Lim told TechCrunch in an email that when he started working on Doctor Anywhere, there were already successful telemedicine platforms in the United States, the United Kingdom and China, but the model was still nascent in Southeast Asia. A former investor, Lim began Doctor Anywhere as a side project because he had older relatives who could not leave their homes for medical visits. 

Doctor Anywhere launched as an online-only telehealth platform, but “we quickly realized that physical presence is very important in order to build trust with users,” Lim said. As a result, the company started its home care services and physical clinics. 

According to Doctor Anywhere’s estimates, the COVID-19 pandemic fast-tracked the adoption of telehealth services in Southeast Asia by at least five years. The company saw more demand for online medical consultations, medication deliveries and marketplace purchases. 

“In the past year, we have more than doubled the size of our network, from around 1,000 providers at the start of 2020 to currently close to 2,500 medical professionals across Southeast Asia,” Lim said. 

In response to the pandemic, Doctor Anywhere launched an online COVID-19 Medical Advisory Clinic last year to provide on-demand consultations for people with suspected symptoms. It also created an online mental wellness module with psychologists. Lim said the company has seen an increase in demand for mental health-related services, like insomnia and anxiety. 

Other telehealth startups in the region include WhiteCoat, Speedoc and Doctor World. Lim said Doctor Anywhere wants to differentiate by quickly launching new products in response to user inquiries, and “cultivating a balance between technology and human touch.” 

The funding will be used to deepen Doctor Anywhere’s presence in its current markets and expand into new ones. It also plans to scale its tech infrastructure and big data capabilities for a better online-to-offline user experience, and will introduce new medical specialty modules, shorten medication delivery times and develop personalized healthcare plans. 

News: Rugged showcases its layout-printing construction robots

• August 30, 2021
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Few robotics categories are poised to benefit more from the events of the past year than construction. It’s a booming field that could benefit massively from automaton, a fact that’s only been amplified as the pandemic brought many nonessential businesses to a standstill. We’ve seen a number of players in the category raise notable rounds

Few robotics categories are poised to benefit more from the events of the past year than construction. It’s a booming field that could benefit massively from automaton, a fact that’s only been amplified as the pandemic brought many nonessential businesses to a standstill. We’ve seen a number of players in the category raise notable rounds over the past year or so, including Toggle, Dusty, Scaled and SkyMul.

Founded in 2018, Houston-based Rugged Robotics raised a $2.5 million seed round back in 2019. While the company isn’t actively raising at the moment, it has already begun to roll out its technology in early pilots, including a partnership with Massachusetts-based construction-firm Consigli.

Image Credits: Rugged Robotics

“We had a client that was pretty progressive looking,” said Consigli’s Jack Moran. “It’s a building where we were controlling the core shell of the project, as well as the fit-out, which was pretty complex — lots of odd shapes that would be a challenge for us.”

Rugged’s self-described “layout Roomba” was used to help build a 10-story building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, effectively drawing blueprints on the ground of the space that amounted to around 40,000 square feet per floor. The partnership effectively finds Rugged taking a key step from its early research and development mode to commercialize.

“The layout process is the most important task in the construction process,” Rugged founder and CEO Derrick Morse said in an interview with TechCrunch. “Marking where things are installed defines where things are built. A mistake made during layout trickles into the overall construction process and it results in rework, delays and additional expenses.”

The team is still small, with a headcount of around six full-time employees, including co-founders with backgrounds at NASA and Samsung. The team currently has three robots, with plans to expand to five. They print dot matrix ink patterns on the ground to give construction teams a real-world orientation for the buildings they’re creating.

Image Credits: Rugged Robotics

A member of the Rugged team travels to the site with the robot to supervise the robot as it executes on its plans, with the startup charging the construction company through a RaaS (robotics as a service) model.

“We have insatiable customer demand,” said Morse. “We have several multibillion-dollar contractors that are excited to do pilots and demos with us. We’ll be growing the organization and fleet in the upcoming 12 months, and we’ll likely be bringing in additional capital to enable that growth.”

News: Daily Crunch: China sets three-hour weekly time limit for under-18 gamers

• August 30, 2021
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Hello friends and welcome to Daily Crunch, bringing you the most important startup, tech and venture capital news in a single package.

To get a roundup of TechCrunch’s biggest and most important stories delivered to your inbox every day at 3 p.m. PDT, subscribe here.

Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for August 30, 2021. The startup world is gearing up for Y Combinator Demo Day this week, but the rest of tech isn’t taking a pause. So we have Apple news, Telegram news, antitrust news, video game news, you name it.

But we have some TechCrunch news to start: Ryan Reynolds is coming to Disrupt to talk about his company, Maximum Effort. That’s pretty hype. And we’re going to be talking about software. A lot. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• China restricts youth gaming: To three hours per week! Which isn’t much! For a country with a large games market like China, this is big darn news. But it’s just one part of a larger regulatory push in China (including things as far afield as taking on online fan culture!) to bring its private companies more in line with the government’s plans.
• Toast’s IPO looks tasty: TechCrunch took a longer look at Boston-based Toast’s IPO filing today. Our takeaways? That the company has posted admirable growth since its COVID lows and has a very sturdy multipart business model. The company is doing the very active Boston startup scene proud.
• Spotify buys Joe Rogan, Apple buys classical music? The campaign to build differentiated music streaming services in an era when music is available everywhere hotted up this week with Apple buying Primephonic. The smaller company, based in Amsterdam, will be absorbed into Apple Music.

Startups/VC

Ready for a broadside of startup news? Good. We have what you need. But first, as a sign of the times, Telegram just crossed the 1 billion download mark. That’s an achievement, sure, but also goes to show that maybe consumers do care about privacy after all.

• Casper’s unfriendly ghost fails to haunt Eight Sleep: Remember when D2C mattress company Casper went public, and it went poorly? That misstep has not stopped investors from putting new capital into Eight Sleep, which makes smart mattresses. The startup just raised $86 million in a Series C round of funding that values it at nearly a half-billion dollars.
• Prive raises $1.7M for better e-commerce subscriptions: Two ex-Uber folks are building something new to make e-commerce subscriptions, helping both retailers sell more goods and consumers get better recommendations. Win/win.
• At long last, a personal CRM? I don’t want to get your hopes up, as building a personal CRM has been a white whale in startupland for some time. But Clay, a startup that just raised $8 million, has put together what TechCrunch calls “a system designed to help you be more thoughtful with the people in your life.” Please let it be good. I need help.
• Alpaca proves that embedded fintech is still hot: TechCrunch has covered Alpaca a few times in recent years, both when it raised capital and when we were delving more deeply into the world of API-delivered startups. Today the company announced a $50 million Series B, a partnership with Plaid and support for crypto trading. Alpaca’s work to provide other fintechs with embedded equities trading appears to be going well.
• How does one become a travel influencer? I don’t know. But if you become one, Thatch wants you to be able to better monetize your recommendations. If you are currently a travel influencer, this is good news. If you were hoping that influencers would lose influence in the coming years, this is not.
• To cap us off today, Ola Electric is looking to raise between $250 million and $500 million. That’s a huge chunk of change. The deal has yet to close, but our early reporting indicates that Ola’s electric vehicle business is about to be more than flush. “Falcon Edge Capital is in advanced talks to lead the round, which values Ola Electric between $2.75 billion to $3.5 billion,” TechCrunch reports.
• Plus, over the weekend I wrote about why startups are going to win the battle to set the tone regarding remote work, in case you wanted to give that a read.

How Amazon EC2 grew from a notion into a foundational element of cloud computing

In August 2006, AWS activated its EC2 cloud-based virtual computer, a milestone in the cloud infrastructure giant’s development.

“You really can’t overstate what Amazon was able to accomplish,” writes enterprise reporter Ron Miller.

In the 15 years since, EC2 has enabled clients of any size to test and run their own applications on AWS’ virtual machines.

To learn more about a fundamental technological shift that “would help fuel a whole generation of startups,” Ron interviewed EC2 VP Dave Brown, who built and led the Amazon EC2 front-end team.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

• ByteDance buys VR hardware startup: Sure, Facebook is a leader in the VR hardware game, but it’s hardly the only player. TikTok parent company ByteDance is looking to take Facebook on by buying Pico, which had raised a $37 million round earlier this year. It’s not clear how this news intersects with gaming restrictions in China, but now we should have national champions duking it out in the VR market.
• Instagram wants to know your birthday: If you aren’t into giving Facebook products more of your data, bad news today from Instagram. It will prompt users to share their birthday and only allow so many deferrals. Why? TechCrunch reports that the change is to help “personalize your experience” on the service. Which means ads.
• Ideanomics buys Via Motors: Ideanomics, a public mobility company, is spending $450 million in stock to buy Via Motors, an EV company. Shares of Ideanomics are up just over 5% today on the news.
• It turns out that most Big Tech employees aren’t opposed to antitrust enforcement, even though the ideas being bandied about the halls of Congress could make life harder for the megacorps that currently constitute the top end of the technology industry.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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Join Danny Crichton on Twitter Spaces tomorrow, Tuesday, August 31st at 1 p.m. PDT/4 p.m. EDT as he talks with Azeem Azhar about his upcoming book, “The Exponential Age: How Accelerating Technology is Transforming Business, Politics and Society,” which will be released on September 7, 2021.

News: Square to launch a new paid subscription, Invoices Plus

• August 30, 2021
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Square’s popular free invoicing software is becoming the company’s next big subscription service. The company is poised to announced a paid subscription offering called Invoices Plus, which will offer sellers a set of advanced features, including some that had previously been available with the free service. The service itself had been quietly introduced to individual

Square’s popular free invoicing software is becoming the company’s next big subscription service. The company is poised to announced a paid subscription offering called Invoices Plus, which will offer sellers a set of advanced features, including some that had previously been available with the free service. The service itself had been quietly introduced to individual sellers, but has not yet been publicly announced.

Some sellers who were already using Square Invoices were recently alerted to the upcoming changes via email.

In the announcement shared with some sellers (the details of which can also be viewed here on a Square Seller Community forum), the new subscription will include a series of features that were released in the past year as part of a limited trial.

This includes multi-page estimates, custom invoice templates, and custom invoice fields. These will now become a part of Invoices Plus, as will two other features: the ability to automatically convert accepted estimates to invoices and the ability to build milestone-based schedules (three-plus installment invoices). Square’s announcement said it will introduce a “trial” button next to these features in the Square Invoices software to alert customers to the upcoming capabilities. (see below)

Image Credits: Square website

Square’s free invoicing software will not go away, the announcement noted. Sellers will be able to send unlimited invoices for free, as well as estimates and contracts, with the free plan. Free users will also be able to use invoice tracking, reminders and reporting tools.

The free plan has historically relied on processing fees to generate revenue. At present, this is 2.9% + $0.30 per invoice paid online by check or debit card plus a 1% fee per ACH transaction, per Square’s website. (Fees are slightly lower on in-person transactions and slightly higher for “card on file” transactions.) Pricing for the new, paid subscription has not yet been publicly announced.

A Square employee had explained the reasoning behind the change on the community forum site. They noted that many of Square’s other products — like Square Online, Appointments, Square for Retail, and Square for Restaurants — also offer both a free and paid tier. And although Square charges processing fees for Square Invoices, they aren’t enough to fuel its product development. With Invoices Plus, they said, the company aims to compete more directly with paid invoicing apps and products and the more advanced features those products offer.

Reached for comment, Square confirmed to TechCrunch Invoices Plus is a software subscription the company plans to announce shortly. But the company didn’t want to share more details until the news is official.

References to the new subscription have also already made their way to the Square app’s code, where they were spotted by iOS developer Steve Moser. The code indicates users who previously used some of the paid-only features will be able to still use them for the time being. But as the announcement had also noted, sellers would not be able to use the paid features for free the next time they’re creating new files with Square Invoices.

Image Credits: Steve Moser

The new service arrives shortly after Square announced earnings, where it noted its seller business brought in $1.31 billion in revenue (out of the total of $4.68 billion) and $585 million of gross profit in the second quarter, driven in part by continued strong online growth. The company also announced its plan to acquire the buy now, pay later giant Afterpay in a $29 billion deal, speaking to its interest in chasing the broader payments market. The deal also offers Square a way to connect its different products, by allowing Afterpay customers to pay their monthly installments through Square’s Cash App, the company said.

An integration between Square and Afterpay is something that could be seen further down the road, as well, one could imagine. That’s something Square also hinted towards in a response to another seller on its community forum site, where a rep updated an older answer to share news of the acquisition, adding Square didn’t “have integration timelines to share at the moment.”

News: New Zealand-based student wellbeing platform Komodo raises $1.8M NZD

• August 30, 2021
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Adolescence is a turbulent period and its challenges are being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in the best of times, teens dealing with personal and school problems might have trouble talking about them. New Zealand-based startup Komodo is a student wellbeing platform that wants to give students a place to communicate with staff, while

Adolescence is a turbulent period and its challenges are being exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. Even in the best of times, teens dealing with personal and school problems might have trouble talking about them. New Zealand-based startup Komodo is a student wellbeing platform that wants to give students a place to communicate with staff, while providing schools with data to help them spot and address issues like depression or bullying.

Founded in 2018 by Chris Bacon, Matt Goodson and Jack Wood, the startup announced today it has raised $1.8 million NZD (about $1.26 million) in seed funding led by Folklore Ventures, with participation from Icehouse Ventures and Flying Fox Ventures. Individual investors included employee engagement platform Culture Amp co-founder Rod Hamilton; Chloe Hamman, Culture Amp’s director of people science; leaders from learning platform Education Perfect; and Kristi Grant, the director of people experience at Auror.

Some of Komodo’s clients and partners in New Zealand and Australia include Marist College Ashgrove in Queensland; St. Andrew’s College in Christchurch; the Australian Boarding Schools Association (ABSA); Independent Schools of New Zealand; and the Council of British International Schools.

Komodo was originally created to monitor the wellbeing of youth athletes, based on research Bacon performed while earning a PhD at the University of Canterbury. A lot of its clients were schools, and that’s when the team began to expand Komodo’s scope.

“The draw for us was witnessing specific examples,” Wood told TechCrunch. “We had schools coming back to us saying ‘we’ve got a kid that’s been bullied for the past three months who hasn’t even remotely felt confident to approach a staff member and start talking about it. We’ve finally seen that come up in Komodo and they feel happy they have a confidential channel to voice that concern.’”

Komodo co-founders Jack Wood and Chris Bacon

Komodo has a web application and a mobile app, which is what most students use. The platform can be customized by schools and includes psychologist-designed surveys and questions about topics like how students feel about going to school, socialization and relationships or major transitions like starting high school or preparing for university. The amount of time students check into Komodo depends on their school. At some it’s once a week, others once every two weeks or month. Schools use the platform differently based on their environment—for example, if they’re learning remotely, they may do more frequent check-ins.

For schools, data collected from surveys can help them see trends emerge and catch potential problems earlier, like cyberbullying. Before implementing Komodo, its founders say some schools did wellbeing surveys a few times per year, but many of them relied on staff and teachers’ intuition—for example, if a student who is typically outgoing suddenly becomes withdrawn. Komodo gives them a more efficient way to identify and address issues, though Wood and Bacon emphasize that it’s not meant to replace person-to-person interactions.

“Ultimately our bigger vision is facilitating and getting wellbeing support to students as early as possible,” said Bacon. The founders have spent a lot of time talking with Culture Amp’s Hamilton “about how it’s really important that the individuals you’re providing data to can actually understand and use it on a regular basis,” he added. “The key part for us to provide visibility and psychologists who can come in and support [school staff] even more.”

Komodo’s seed funding will be used to add more psychologists to its in-house team, develop the platform and expand into more schools in Australia and New Zealand before other markets, including the United States.