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News: Communication software startup Channels takes on event management with text workflow

• August 20, 2021
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Three University of Michigan students are building Channels Inc., a communication software tailored for physical workers, and already racking up some big customers in the event management industry.

Three University of Michigan students are building Channels Inc., a communication software tailored for physical workers, and already racking up some big customers in the event management industry.

Siddharth Kaul, 18, Elan Rosen, 20, and Ibrahim Mohammed, 20, started the company after finding some common ground in retail and events. The company’s customer list boasts names like Marriott Hotels, and it announced a $520,000 seed round, led by Sahra Growth Capital, to give it nearly $570,000 in total funding.

Kaul grew up going to a lot of events in Kuwait and Dubai, but started noticing there was a delay in things that should happen and many processes were being done on pen and paper.

“The technology that was available was inharmonious and made it hard for physical workers to fulfill tasks,” Kaul told TechCrunch. “We saw it happening in the event management space, forcing workers to coordinate across technologies.”

Legacy communication platforms like Slack are aggregating communications, but are better for remote workers; for physical workers, they rely more on text communication, he said. However, the disadvantage with texting is that you have to keep scrolling to get to the new message, and old communication is lost amid all of the replies.

They began developing a platform for small hotels to help them transition to digital and provide communication in a non-chronological order that is easier to access, enables discussion and can be searched. Users of the SaaS platform can build live personnel maps to see where employees are and what the event floor looks like, prioritize alerts and automate tasks while monitoring progress.

Marriott became a customer after one of its employees saw the Channels platform was being tested at an event. He saw employees pulling out their phones and asked the manager why they were doing that, and was told they were testing out the product and referred him to Kaul.

“What they thought was helpful was that it was communication, and though the employees were checking their phones, it was quick and they remained attentive,” Kaul said.

Channels provides a solid platform in terms of analytics and graphical representation, which is a major selling point for customers, leading to initial traction and revenue for the company that Rosen said he expects can occur at the convention level the company is striving for.

The new funding will be used to grow in development and bring additional engineering talent to the team. In addition, it will allow Kaul and Rosen to continue with their studies, while Mohammed will be doing more full-time work. They want to increase their recurring revenue in the Middle East while building up operations in the United States.

Jamal Al-Barrak, managing partner of Sahra Growth Capital, said Channels was on his firm’s radar ever since they won the 2020 Dubai X-Series competition it sponsors. As a result of winning the competition, he was able to see the founders on multiple occasions and hear their growth.

Sahra doesn’t typically invest in companies like Channels, but the firm started a “seed sourcing effort” to make investments of between $200,000 and $800,000 into early-stage companies, Al-Barrak said. Channels is one of the first investments with that effort.

“Channels is one of our first investments in this initiative and they look very promising so far even compared to our investments before we started this initiative,” Al-Barrak said. He liked the founders’ work ethic and their focus on the event industry, which he called, “historically outdated and bereft of technological innovation.”

“Sid, Elan and Ibrahim are some of the youngest yet brightest entrepreneurs I have come across to this day and I have invested in over 25 technology startups,” he said. “Additionally, I enjoyed that they had proof of concept with a prior customer base and revenue. I was most impressed by their vision past their current industry and bounds as they want to encapsulate communication for all physical workers, whether it is events, retail or more.”

 

News: Apple launches a new iOS app, ‘Siri Speech Study,’ to gather feedback for Siri improvements

• August 20, 2021
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Apple recently began a research study designed to collect speech data from study participants. Earlier this month, the company launched a new iOS app called “Siri Speech Study” on the App Store, which allows participants who have opted in to share their voice requests and other feedback with Apple. The app is available in a

Apple recently began a research study designed to collect speech data from study participants. Earlier this month, the company launched a new iOS app called “Siri Speech Study” on the App Store, which allows participants who have opted in to share their voice requests and other feedback with Apple. The app is available in a number of worldwide markets but does not register on the App Store’s charts, including under the “Utilities” category where it’s published.

According to data from Sensor Tower, the iOS app first launched on August 9 and was updated to a new version on August 18. It’s currently available in the U.S., Canada, Germany, France, Hong Kong, India, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, and Taiwan — an indication of the study’s global reach. However, the app will not appear when searching the App Store by keyword or when browsing through the list of Apple’s published apps.

The Siri Speech Study app itself offers little information about the study’s specific goals, nor does it explain how someone could become a participant. Instead, it only provides a link to a fairly standard license agreement and a screen where a participant would enter their ID number to get started.

Reached for comment, Apple told TechCrunch the app is only being used for Siri product improvements, by offering a way for participants to share feedback directly with Apple. The company also explained people have to be invited to the study — there’s not a way for consumers to sign up to join.

The app is only one of many ways Apple is working to improve Siri.

In the past, Apple had tried to learn more about Siri’s mistakes by sending some small portion of consumers’ voice recordings to contractors for manual grading and review. But a whistleblower alerted media outlet The Guardian that the process had allowed them to listen in on confidential details at times. Apple shortly thereafter made manual review an opt-in process and brought audio grading in-house. This type of consumer data collection continues, but has a different aim that what a research study would involve.

Unlike this broader, more generalized data collection, a focus group-like study allows Apple to better understand Siri’s mistakes because it combines the collected data with human feedback. With the Siri Speech Study app, participants provide explicit feedback on per request basis, Apple said. For instance, if Siri misheard a question, users could explain what they were trying to ask. If Siri was triggered when the user hadn’t said “Hey Siri,” that could be noted. Or if Siri on HomePod misidentified the speaker in a multi-person household, the participant could note that, too.

Another differentiator is that none of the participants’ data is being automatically shared with Apple. Rather, users can see a list of the Siri requests they’ve made and then select which to send to Apple with their feedback. Apple also noted no user information is collected or used in the app, except the data directly provided by participants.

Apple understands that an intelligent virtual assistant that understands you is a competitive advantage.

This year, the company scooped up ex-Google A.I. scientist Samy Bengio to help make Siri a stronger rival to Google Assistant, whose advanced capabilities are often a key selling point for Android devices. In the home, meanwhile, Alexa-powered smart speakers are dominating the U.S. market and compete with Google in the global landscape, outside China. Apple’s HomePod has a long way to go to catch up.

But despite the rapid progress in voice-based computing in recent years, virtual assistants can still have a hard time understanding certain types of speech. Earlier this year, for example, Apple said it would use a bank of audio clips from podcasts where users had stuttered to help it improve its understanding of this kind of speech pattern. Assistants can also stumble when there are multiple devices in a home that are listening for voice commands from across several rooms. And assistants can mess up when trying to differentiate between different family members’ voices or when trying to understand a child’s voice.

In other words, there are still many avenues a speech study could pursue over time, even if these aren’t its current focus.

That Apple is running a Siri speech study isn’t necessarily new. The company has historically run evaluations and studies like this in some form. But it’s less common to find Apple’s studies published directly on the App Store.

Though Apple could have published the app through the enterprise distribution process to keep it more under wraps, it chose to use its public marketplace. This more closely follows the App Store’s rules, as the research study is not an internally-facing app meant only for Apple employees.

Still, it’s not likely consumers will stumble across the app and be confused — the Siri Speech Study app is hidden from discovery. You have to have the app’s direct link to find it. (Good thing we’re nosy!)

News: China passes data protection law

• August 20, 2021
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China has passed a personal data protection law, state media Xinhua reports (via Reuters). The law, called the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), is set to take effect on November 1. It was proposed last year — signalling an intent by China’s communist leaders to crack down on unscrupulous data collection in the commercial sphere

China has passed a personal data protection law, state media Xinhua reports (via Reuters).

The law, called the Personal Information Protection Law (PIPL), is set to take effect on November 1.

It was proposed last year — signalling an intent by China’s communist leaders to crack down on unscrupulous data collection in the commercial sphere by putting legal restrictions on user data collection.

The new law requires app makers to offer users options over how their information is or isn’t used, such as the ability not to be targeted for marketing purposes or to have marketing based on personal characteristics, according to Xinhua.

It also places requirements on data processors to obtain consent from individuals in order to be able to process sensitive types of data such as biometrics, medical and health data, financial information and location data.

While apps that illegally process user data risk having their service suspended or terminated.

Any Western companies doing business in China which involves processing citizens’ personal data must grapple with the law’s extraterritorial jurisdiction — meaning foreign companies will face regulatory requirements such as the need to assign local representatives and report to supervisory agencies in China.

On the surface, core elements of China’s new data protection regime mirror requirements long baked into European Union law — where the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) provides citizens with a comprehensive set of rights wrapping their personal data, including putting a similarly high bar on consent to process what EU law refers to as ‘special category data’, such as health data (although elsewhere there are differences in what personal information is considered the most sensitive by the respective data laws).

The GDPR is also extraterritorial in scope.

But the context in which China’s data protection law will operate is also of course very different — not least given how the Chinese state uses a vast data-gathering operation to keep tabs on and police the behavior of its own citizens.

Any limits the PIPL might place on Chinese government departments’ ability to collect data on citizens — state organs were covered in draft versions of the law — may be little more than window-dressing to provide a foil for continued data collection by the Chinese Communist Party (CCP)’s state security apparatus while further consolidating its centralized control over government.

It also remains to be seen how the CCP could use the new data protection rules to further regulate — some might say tame — the power of the domestic tech sector.

It has been cracking down on the sector in a number of ways, using regulatory changes as leverage over giants like Tencent. Earlier this month, for example, Beijing filed a civil suit against the tech giant — citing claims that its messaging-app WeChat’s youth mode does not comply with laws protecting minors.

The PIPL provides the Chinese regime with plenty more attack surface to put strictures on local tech companies.

Nor is it wasting any time in attacking data-mining practices that are common place among Western tech giants but now look likely to face growing friction if deployed by companies within China.

Reuters notes that the National People’s Congress marked the passage of the law today by publishing an op-ed from state media outlet People’s Court Daily which lauds the legislation and calls for entities that use algorithms for “personalized decision making” — such as recommendation engines — to obtain user consent first.

Quoting the op-ed, it writes: “Personalization is the result of a user’s choice, and true personalized recommendations must ensure the user’s freedom to choose, without compulsion. Therefore, users must be given the right to not make use of personalized recommendation functions.”

There is growing concern over algorithmic targeting outside China, too, of course.

In Europe, lawmaker and regulators have been calling for tighter restrictions on behavioral advertising — as the bloc is in the process of negotiating a swathe of new digital regulations that will expand its power to regulate the sector, such as the proposed Digital Markets Act and Digital Services Act.

Regulating the Internet is clearly the new geopolitical battleground as regions compete to shape the future of data flows to suit their respective economic, political and social goals.

News: Facebook launches program to help small Indian businesses secure loans

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Facebook is launching a new program in India to help small and medium-sized businesses secure loans in the South Asian market as the company makes further push to expand its presence among merchants. The social conglomerate said its new program, called Small Business Loans Initiative, addresses some of the biggest pain points small businesses face

Facebook is launching a new program in India to help small and medium-sized businesses secure loans in the South Asian market as the company makes further push to expand its presence among merchants.

The social conglomerate said its new program, called Small Business Loans Initiative, addresses some of the biggest pain points small businesses face when securing loans.

The company, which last year announced a $4.3 million grant for small businesses in India, said the program will allow its lending partners to grant small ticket loans — between 500,000 Indian rupees ($6,720) to 50,00,000 ($67,200) — at a predefined interest rate of 17%-20% per annum and won’t require the businesses to provide any collateral at the time of applying.

At the time of launch, company’s pilot lending partner is CDC Group-backed Gurgaon-headquartered Indifi, which will disburse the loan amount within five working days of the borrower completing all documentation formalities after acceptance of the offer by Indifi.

Facebook said it’s working in “arm’s length” with its lending partners, but those partners will be handling all the risks of loan payments and determining the eligibility criteria.

Facebook, on its part, is making businesses aware of the lending program and has worked to improve the underlying lending framework such as boundaries for interest rate, engagement responsiveness between the lending partner and businesses (there will be an on-call support system within one day of applying) and ticket size of the credit amount.

In a call with reporters on Friday, Facebook India head Ajit Mohan said the small businesses in 200 Indian cities can apply for the loan.

Businesses wholly or partially run by women will be able to secure the loan at a special 0.2% reduction rates per annum.

This is the first time Facebook has launched a program of this kind in any market, the company told TechCrunch.

According to a survey conducted by Facebook in collaboration with OECD and the World Bank last year, almost a third of operational small and medium-sized businesses on Facebook in 2020 said that they expected cash flow to be one of their primary challenges.

The company is not monetizing this program. “We believe it is in our self-interest for there to be massive growth in the small business ecosystem in India because as a company we are playing this for the long term. We will disproportionately benefit because a lot of these small business activity happens on our apps as they grow,” said Mohan.

“We are not looking to make money from this program. We don’t have any revenue sharing agreement. We are not putting any constraint on how this money is spent,” he said. “Frankly, we are also hoping that on the back of a program like this other companies will also create programs so that there is more access to credit in the market. That will be good for us all. There is no transactional objective here.”

This is a developing story. More to follow…

News: Alerzo raises $10.5M Series A to bring Nigeria’s informal retail sector online

• August 20, 2021
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The process of digitizing the operations of mom and pop stores in Nigeria is serious business right now. In fact, it might be the second-best thing after fintech at the moment. Today’s news is from Alerzo, a little-known B2B e-commerce retail startup based in Ibadan, Nigeria. The company is announcing a $10.5 million Series A

The process of digitizing the operations of mom and pop stores in Nigeria is serious business right now. In fact, it might be the second-best thing after fintech at the moment.

Today’s news is from Alerzo, a little-known B2B e-commerce retail startup based in Ibadan, Nigeria. The company is announcing a $10.5 million Series A round led by New York-based Nosara Capital. FJ Labs and several family offices from the U.S., Europe and Asia, including Michael Novogratz’s, participated in the round.

In total, Alerzo has raised more than $20 million since its launch. Early investors include the Baobab Network, an Africa-focused accelerator based in London, and Signal Hill, a Singapore-based fund manager that participated in its $5.5 million seed round last year. The company also said it closed a $2.5 million working capital facility to serve its customers.

Adewale Opaleye founded Alerzo in 2018 as a last-mile distribution platform that helps retailers stock inventory directly from manufacturers. Its business, officially launched in 2019, is centered on helping street-side vendors and shops in Nigeria’s south-western cities access household supplies quicker and efficiently.

Speaking with TechCrunch, Opaleye said he started Alerzo to empower the millions of women who are the backbone of consumer commerce in Nigeria’s $100 billion informal retail sector.

The need to solve this problem stemmed from observing firsthand the challenges his mom faced while operating two mom-and-pop stores.

“Growing up in Ibadan, I watched my mother operate two informal retail stores to raise my three siblings and me. Seeing the many challenges she faced running her stores, and I decided to start a business that uniquely catered to the needs of retailers just like her,” he told TechCrunch in an interview. 

These retailers are beholden to an inefficient distribution system that results in inconsistent inventory availability, opaque pricing and limited access to formal financial and banking services.

The founder says Ibadan was the ideal market to establish its headquarters because informal retailers in the region experience these challenges more than those in Lagos.

Alerzo’s core business distributes FMCG goods using a first-party relationship platform which allows suppliers to clear inventory faster and lets Alerzo control the supply chain and delivery.

Given the lack of trust in the marketplace and the requirement to pay on delivery, Opaleye says this was the most inclusive business model where the economics made sense for the company.

Alerzo claims to have built up a network of up to 100,000 small businesses, 90% of which are women-led. The company exclusively serves the country’s tier-2 to tier-4 cities in Southwest Nigeria — Ibadan, Ekiti and Abeokuta, to name a few. It connects retailers to local and multinational distributors of consumer brands, like Unilever, Nestlé, Procter & Gamble, Dangote, and PZ.

“Without Alerzo, these retailers need to take a day off from the store to visit a central market, pay for transportation and haul a large amount of inventory back to the store. Alerzo replaces this stressful experience by not only reducing costs and time spent running a retail shop but also improving the livelihood of these working women,” said the founder about the company’s growth.

About one-third of the total retailers on Alerzo use the platform monthly. According to its website, retailers can order products via SMS, voice and WhatsApp and deliver them to their stores in less than 10 hours. The company claims to have processed over 1 million orders this past year.

Alerzo owns and operates its full-stack tech-driven supply chain and logistics to process these orders. The company provides warehousing and fulfillment solutions to suppliers and storefront delivery to informal retailers. It currently owns over 200 vehicles and 20 warehouses to serve its thousands of customers.

The last couple of years have seen a rise in last-mile delivery and distribution companies with a large increase in on-demand services across many sectors. While most players in Nigeria tend to focus on Lagos and Nigeria’s capital city Abuja, Alerzo’s approach to covering other cities has seemingly paid off so far.

But though Alerzo has enjoyed almost a first-mover advantage in less crowded markets, stiff competition will play out as other key players look to come in. Omnibiz, for instance, has Ibadan in its sights, and TradeDepot is setting up a presence in 10 to 15 cities, aiming to cover all major cities in the country by the end of the year.

Nevertheless, Alerzo’s investors remain bullish on the company’s potentials.

“We’ve studied informal retail marketplaces globally over the last couple of years and Alerzo really stood out to us due to a strong management team led by a founder with a unique understanding of his customer and an attractive business model with exceptional unit economics,” said Ian Loizeaux, the managing partner at Nosara Capital, in a statement. “The company is at the beginning of a compelling multi-decade opportunity to streamline and digitize Nigeria’s retail supply chain.”

Seed investor Kevin Jung of Signal Hill cites Alerzo’s focus on the informal retail market outside Lagos as one of the reasons why he backed Alerzo earlier on. He also referred to the company’s orientation toward Asia (a playbook Opaleye adopted when he went to China for studies in 2016), as the best reference point for the emerging business model of digitizing informal retail markets. 

Alerzo has an office in Singapore that the CEO says serves as a regional hub to identify best practices among similar high-growth businesses operating across Southeast Asia and India and adapt them to the Nigerian market. Likewise, to expand its digital footprint, the company recently launched an office in Lagos.   

The proceeds from this Series A round will be used to expand geographically to northern Nigeria. Alerzo also plans to launch AlerzoPay, the company’s cashless payments and lending platform, as well as a portfolio of new business support services.

News: Microsoft backs India’s Oyo at $9.6 billion valuation

• August 20, 2021
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Microsoft has invested $5 million in Indian budget hotel chain Oyo, according to a regulatory filing this week. The investment confirms a TechCrunch scoop from last month. The new investment values Oyo at $9.6 billion, only slightly below the $10 billion implied valuation from the Indian startup’s previous financing round in 2019. The startup, which

Microsoft has invested $5 million in Indian budget hotel chain Oyo, according to a regulatory filing this week. The investment confirms a TechCrunch scoop from last month.

The new investment values Oyo at $9.6 billion, only slightly below the $10 billion implied valuation from the Indian startup’s previous financing round in 2019. The startup, which lost significant business to the pandemic, was valued at just $3 billion in recent quarters by SoftBank, one of its largest investors.

TechCrunch reported earlier that this strategic investment may also involve Oyo shifting to use Microsoft’s cloud services. The company is planning to file for an IPO later this year, according to two people familiar with the matter.

Oyo, which is one of India’s most valuable startups, has aggressively expanded to many markets including Southeast Asia, Europe and the U.S. in recent years.  But some of its missteps — “toxic culture,” lapse in governance, and relationship with many hotel owners — have scarred its growth.

Just as the startup was pledging to improve its relationship with hotel owners, the pandemic arrived. In response, Oyo slowed its growth and laid off thousands of employees globally earlier this year as nations across the world enforced lockdowns.

The pandemic hit the seven-year-old startup like a “cyclone,” Agarwal told Bloomberg TV last month. “We built something for so many years and it took just 30 days for it drop by over 60%,” he said, adding that the firm had not made any decision on exploring the public markets.

Airbnb-backed Oyo had between $780 million to $800 million in its bank, Agarwal said at a virtual conference recently and had pared its “monthly burn” across all businesses to $4 million to $5 million. (The startup had about $1 billion in the bank in December 2020.)

Last month — after Agarwal’s remarks at the aforementioned conference — Oyo said it had raised $660 million in debt. That debt was used to pay off the previous debt, according to a person familiar with the matter.

If the deal between the two firms materializes, it will be Microsoft’s latest investment in an Indian startup. The firm has backed a handful of startups in the South Asian market, including news aggregator and short-video platform DailyHunt, e-commerce giant Flipkart, and logistics SaaS firm FarEye.

News: Top four highlights of Elon Musk’s Tesla AI Day

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Elon Musk wants Tesla to be seen as “much more than an electric car company.” On Thursday’s Tesla AI Day, the CEO described Tesla as a company with “deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level” that can be used down the line for applications beyond self-driving cars, including

Elon Musk wants Tesla to be seen as “much more than an electric car company.” On Thursday’s Tesla AI Day, the CEO described Tesla as a company with “deep AI activity in hardware on the inference level and on the training level” that can be used down the line for applications beyond self-driving cars, including a humanoid robot that Tesla is apparently building.

Tesla AI Day, which started after a rousing 45 minutes of industrial music pulled straight from “The Matrix” soundtrack, featured a series of Tesla engineers explaining various Tesla tech with the clear goal of recruiting the best and brightest to join Tesla’s vision and AI team and help the company go to autonomy and beyond.

“There’s a tremendous amount of work to make it work and that’s why we need talented people to join and solve the problem,” said Musk.

Like both “Battery Day” and “Autonomy Day,” the event on Thursday was streamed live on Tesla’s YouTube channel. There was a lot of super technical jargon, but here are the top four highlights of the day.

Tesla Bot: A definitely real humanoid robot

This bit of news was the last update to come out of AI Day before audience questions began, but it’s certainly the most interesting. After the Tesla engineers and executives talked about computer vision, the Dojo supercomputer and the Tesla chip (all of which we’ll get to in a moment), there was a brief interlude where what appeared to be an alien go-go dancer appeared on the stage, dressed in a white body suit with a shiny black mask as a face. Turns out, this wasn’t just a Tesla stunt, but rather an intro to the Tesla Bot, a humanoid robot that Tesla is actually building.

When Tesla talks about using its advanced technology in applications outside of cars, we didn’t think he was talking about robot slaves. That’s not an exaggeration. CEO Elon Musk envisions a world in which the human drudgery like grocery shopping, “the work that people least like to do,” can be taken over by humanoid robots like the Tesla Bot. The bot is 5’8″, 125 pounds, can deadlift 150 pounds, walk at 5 miles per hour and has a screen for a head that displays important information.

“It’s intended to be friendly, of course, and navigate a world built for humans,” said Musk. “We’re setting it such that at a mechanical and physical level, you can run away from it and most likely overpower it.”

Because everyone is definitely afraid of getting beat up by a robot that’s truly had enough, right?

The bot, a prototype of which is expected for next year, is being proposed as a non-automotive robotic use case for the company’s work on neural networks and its Dojo advanced supercomputer. Musk did not share whether the Tesla Bot would be able to dance.

The chip that Tesla revealed on Thursday is called “D1,” and it contains a 7 nm technology. Venkataramanan proudly held up the chip that he said has GPU-level compute with CPU connectivity and twice the I/O bandwidth of “the state of the art networking switch chips that are out there today and are supposed to be the gold standards.” He walked through the technicalities of the chip, explaining that Tesla wanted to own as much of its tech stack as possible to avoid any bottlenecks. Tesla introduced a next-gen computer chip last year, produced by Samsung, but it has not quite been able to escape the global chip shortage that has rocked the auto industry for months. To survive the shortage, Musk said during an earnings call this summer that the company had been forced to rewrite some vehicle software after having to substitute in alternate chips. 

Aside from limited availability, the overall goal of taking the chip production in-house is to increase bandwidth and decrease latencies for better AI performance.

“We can do compute and data transfers simultaneously, and our custom ISA, which is the instruction set architecture, is fully optimized for machine learning workloads,” said Venkataramanan at AI Day. “This is a pure machine learning machine.”

Venkataramanan also revealed a “training tile” that integrates multiple chips to get higher bandwidth and an incredible computing power of 9 petaflops per tile and 36 terabytes per second of bandwidth. Together, the training tiles compose the Dojo supercomputer. 

To Full Self-Driving and beyond

Many of the speakers at the AI Day event noted that Dojo will not just be a tech for Tesla’s “Full Self-Driving” (FSD) system, it’s definitely impressive advanced driver assistance system that’s also definitely not yet fully self-driving or autonomous. The powerful supercomputer is built with multiple aspects, such as the simulation architecture, that the company hopes to expand to be universal and even open up to other automakers and tech companies.

“This is not intended to be just limited to Tesla cars,” said Musk. “Those of you who’ve seen the full self-driving beta can appreciate the rate at which the Tesla neural net is learning to drive. And this is a particular application of AI, but I think there’s more applications down the road that will make sense.”

Musk said Dojo is expected to be operational next year, at which point we can expect talk about how this tech can be applied to many other use cases.

Solving computer vision problems

During AI Day, Tesla backed its vision-based approach to autonomy yet again, an approach that uses neural networks to ideally allow the car to function anywhere on earth via its “Autopilot” system. Tesla’s head of AI, Andrej Karpathy, described Tesla’s architecture as “building an animal from the ground up” that moves around, senses its environment and acts intelligently and autonomously based on what it sees.

“So we are building of course all of the mechanical components of the body, the nervous system, which has all the electrical components, and for our purposes, the brain of the autopilot, and specifically for this section the synthetic visual cortex,” he said.

Karpathy illustrated how Tesla’s neural networks have developed over time, and how now, the visual cortex of the car, which is essentially the first part of the car’s “brain” that processes visual information, is designed in tandem with the broader neural network architecture so that information flows into the system more intelligently.  

The two main problems that Tesla is working on solving with its computer vision architecture are temporary occlusions (like cars at a busy intersection blocking Autopilot’s view of the road beyond) and signs or markings that appear earlier in the road (like if a sign 100 meters back says the lanes will merge, the computer once upon a time had trouble remembering that by the time it made it to the merge lanes).

To solve for this, Tesla engineers fell back on a spatial recurring network video module, wherein different aspects of the module keep track of different aspects of the road and form a space-based and time-based queue, both of which create a cache of data that the model can refer back to when trying to make predictions about the road.

The company flexed its over 1,000-person manual data labeling team and walked the audience through how Tesla auto-labels certain clips, many of which are pulled from Tesla’s fleet on the road, in order to be able to label at scale. With all of this real-world info, the AI team then uses incredible simulation, creating “a video game with Autopilot as the player.” The simulations help particularly with data that’s difficult to source or label, or if it’s in a closed loop.

Background on Tesla’s FSD

At around minute forty in the waiting room, the dubstep music was joined by a video loop showing Tesla’s FSD system with the hand of a seemingly alert driver just grazing the steering wheel, no doubt a legal requirement for the video after investigations into Tesla’s claims about the capabilities of its definitely not autonomous advanced driver assistance system, Autopilot. The National Highway Transportation and Safety Administration earlier this week said they would open a preliminary investigation into Autopilot following 11 incidents in which a Tesla crashed into parked emergency vehicles. 

A few days later, two U.S. Democratic senators called on the Federal Trade Commission to investigate Tesla’s marketing and communication claims around Autopilot and the “Full Self-Driving” capabilities. 

Tesla released the beta 9 version of Full Self-Driving to much fanfare in July, rolling out the full suite of features to a few thousand drivers. But if Tesla wants to keep this feature in its cars, it’ll need to get its tech up to a higher standard. That’s where Tesla AI Day comes in. 

“We basically want to encourage anyone who is interested in solving real-world AI problems at either the hardware or the software level to join Tesla, or consider joining Tesla,” said Musk.

And with technical nuggets as in-depth as the ones featured on Thursday plus a bumping electronic soundtrack, what red-blooded AI engineer wouldn’t be frothing at the mouth to join the Tesla crew?

You can watch the whole thing here: 

News: Musk: The Tesla Bot is coming

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Remember that weird Will Smith movie about robots? Yeah, neither do we. But Elon Musk does. Tesla is developing a 5’8” Tesla Bot, with a prototype expected sometime next year. The news comes during Tesla’s inaugural AI Day, which was streamed on the company’s website Thursday night. The bot is being proposed as a non-automotive

Remember that weird Will Smith movie about robots?

Yeah, neither do we. But Elon Musk does. Tesla is developing a 5’8” Tesla Bot, with a prototype expected sometime next year. The news comes during Tesla’s inaugural AI Day, which was streamed on the company’s website Thursday night.

The bot is being proposed as a non-automotive robotic use case for the company’s work on neural networks and its Dojo advanced supercomputer.

“Basically, if you think about what we’re doing right now with cars, Tesla is arguably the world’s biggest robotics company because our cars are like semi-sentient robots on wheels,” Musk said. “With the Full Self-Driving computer, [ … ] which will keep evolving, and Dojo and all the neural nets recognizing the world, understanding how to navigate through the world, it kind of makes sense to put that on to a humanoid form.”

The bot is “intended to be friendly and navigate through a world built for humans,” he added. He also said they’re developing it so that humans can run away from it and overpower it easily. It’ll weigh 125 pounds and have a walking gait of 5 miles per hour, and its face will be a screen that displays important information.

Interestingly, Musk is imagining this as replacing much of the human drudge work that currently occupies so many people’s lives – not just labor but things like grocery shopping and other everyday tasks. He waxed about a future in which physical work would be a choice, with all the attendant implications that might mean for the economy.

“In the long term I do think there needs to be universal basic income,” Musk said. “But not right now because the robot doesn’t work.”

Musk finished off by inviting engineers to “join our team and help us build this.”

News: Indonesian D2C insurance marketplace Lifepal raises $9M Series A

• August 20, 2021
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Choosing an insurance policy is one of the most complicated financial decisions a person can make. Jakarta-based Lifepal wants to simplify the process for Indonesians with a marketplace that lets users compare policies from more than 50 providers, get help from licensed agents and file claims. The startup, which says it is the country’s largest

Choosing an insurance policy is one of the most complicated financial decisions a person can make. Jakarta-based Lifepal wants to simplify the process for Indonesians with a marketplace that lets users compare policies from more than 50 providers, get help from licensed agents and file claims. The startup, which says it is the country’s largest direct-to-consumer insurance marketplace, announced today it has raised a $9 million Series A. The round was led by ProBatus Capital, a venture firm backed by Prudential Financial, with participation from Cathay Innovation and returning investors Insignia Venture Partners, ATM Capital and Hustle Fund.

Lifepal was founded in 2019 by former Lazada executives Giacomo Ficari and Nicolo Robba, along with Benny Fajarai and Reza Muhammed. The new funding brings its total raised to $12 million.

The marketplace’s partners currently offer about 300 policies for life, health, automotive, property and travel coverage. Ficari, who also co-founded neobank Aspire, told TechCrunch that Lifepal was created to make comparing, buying and claiming insurance as simple as shopping online.

“The same kind of experience a customer has today on a marketplace like Lazada—the convenience, all digital, fast delivery—we saw was lacking in insurance, which is still operating with offline, face-to-face agents like 20 to 30 years ago,” he said.

Indonesia’s insurance penetration rate is only about 3%, but the market is growing along with the country’s gross domestic product thanks to a larger middle-class. “We are really at a tipping point for GDP per capita and a lot of insurance carriers are focusing more on Indonesia,” said Ficari.

Other venture-backed insurtech startups tapping into this demand include Fuse, PasarPolis and Qoala. Both Qoala and PasarPolis focus on “micro-policies,” or inexpensive coverage for things like damaged devices. PasarPolis also partners with Gojek to offer health and accident insurance to drivers. Fuse, meanwhile, insurance specialists an online platform to run their businesses.

Lifepal takes a different approach because it doesn’t sell micro-policies, and its marketplace is for customers to purchase directly from providers, not through agents.
Based on Lifepal’s data, about 60% of its health and life insurance customers are buying coverage for the first time. On the other hand, many automotive insurance shoppers had policies before, but their coverage expired and they decided to shop online instead of going to an agent to get a new one.

Ficari said Lifepal’s target customers overlap with the investment apps that are gaining traction among Indonesia’s growing middle class (like Ajaib, Pluang and Pintu). Many of these apps provide educational content, since their customers are usually millennials investing for the first time, and Lifepal takes a similar approach. Its content side, called Lifepal Media, focuses on articles for people who are researching insurance policies and related topics like personal financial planning. The company says its site, including its blog, now has about 4 million monthly visitors, creating a funnel for its marketplace.

While one of Lifepal’s benefits is enabling people to compare policies on their own, many also rely on its customer support line, which is staffed by licensed insurance agents. In fact, Ficari said about 90% of its customers use it.

“What we realize is that insurance is complicated and it’s expensive,” said Ficari. “People want to take their time to think and they have a lot of questions, so we introduced good customer support.” He added Lifepal’s combination of enabling self-research while providing support is similar to the approach taken by PolicyBazaar in India, one of the country’s largest insurance aggregators.

To keep its business model scalable, Lifepal uses a recommendation engine that matches potential customers with policies and customer support representatives. It considers data points like budget (based on Lifepal’s research, its customers usually spend about 3% to 5% of their yearly income on insurance), age, gender, family composition and if they have purchased insurance before.

Lifepal’s investment from ProBatus will allow it to work with Assurance IQ, the insurance sales automation platform acquired by Prudential Financial two years ago.

In a statement, ProBatus Capital founder and managing partner Ramneek Gupta said Lifepal’s “three-pronged approach” (its educational content, online marketplace and live agents for customer support) has the “potential to change the way the Indonesian consumer buys insurance.”

Part of Lifepal’s funding will be used to build products to make it easier to claim policies. Upcoming products include Insurance Wallet, which will include an application process with support on how to claim a policy—for example, what car repair shop or hospital a customer should go to—and escalation if a claim is rejected. Another product, called Easy Claim, will automate the claim process.

“The goal is to stay end-to-end with the customer, from reading content, comparing policies, buying and then renewing and using them, so you really see people sticking around,” said Ficari.

Lifepal is Cathay Innovation’s third insurtech investment in the past 12 months. Investment director Rajive Keshup told TechCrunch in an email that it backed Lifepal because “the company grew phenomenally last year (12X) and is poised to beat its aggressive 2021 plan despite the proliferation of the COVID delta variant, accentuating the fact that Lifepal is very much on track to replicate the success of similar global models such as Assurance IQ (US) and PolicyBazaar (India).”

News: Daily Crunch: Under pressure from ‘banking partners and payout providers,’ OnlyFans bans explicit content

• August 19, 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 19, 2021. Today is a good day, with lots of interesting news, and even a hot, fresh newsletter from the TechCrunch team. More on that in a moment. Before we start, UiPath CEO Daniel Dines is coming to our October SaaS event. It’s going to be, as the kids say, lit. — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• OnlyFans to kick some adult content off its service: In a move that temporarily broke Twitter and melted TechCrunch servers, well-known subscription content service OnlyFans is moving away from its traditional content varietal. “OnlyFans did not respond to TechCrunch’s inquiries as to its definition of sexually explicit content or how it expected this would impact the company’s bottom line,” is a good summary of where this story is. Expect more as it evolves.
• Chicago puts points on the board for the Midwest: When COVID shook up the venture capital market last year, one city in particular saw its fortunes change — for the better. Since the second half of 2020, Chicago has seen huge sums of money pour into its local startups. We wanted to better understand what happened, and why.
• Feedback divided on Facebook’s meeting VR app: Our own Lucas Matney was modestly positive about Facebook’s new VR service that mimics a conference room. So that we can all enjoy that office vibe from home. Some folks noted that the tech could be great for folks who might have a harder time physically commuting. And lots of people thought it looked like a hot mess on stilts and more of a method for Facebook to change the narrative about its various regulatory issues than really move the VR ball forward.

Startups/VC

Do you love robots and want more robotics in your life? Good news! We’ve shared Brian Heater’s robot roundups here on Daily Crunch for months now. But we won’t have to in the future, because he’s rolling out a newsletter just for the subject. Friends, meet Actuator.

• The Standard Oil of cannabis delivery: Eaze is buying Green Dragon, which is actually pretty big news in the cannabis delivery market. If you live in a part of the U.S., or the world, where you cannot get weed delivered to your house, weep. Civilization will reach you soon enough. Perhaps via an Eaze courier.
• Bird launches electric bike: Bird is busy going public via a SPAC — and it recently dropped its Q2 numbers, mind — but that’s not all the scooter company is up to. It also built an electric bike. Which is frankly cool, as we should rip out a bunch of streets in global cities and replace them with bike paths and green spaces.
• Global regulations as a service: That’s the gambit behind Regology, a startup that automates the process of understanding local laws the world ‘round. As companies increasingly go remote, and the internet has made global commerce the norm, Regology could be onto something. Also from this story, there actually is a venture capital firm called “Acme Capital.” Perhaps they invest in anvils, dynamite and other contra-Road-Runner products.
• Launch House raises $3M to scale venture community: This one is a little bit complicated, so read the story. But in essence: Launch House is building a class-based startup community in physical and digital spaces. And it just put together seven figures of capital to pursue its vision.
• Today’s Tiger Global round is Nacelle: What is Nacelle, and why did Tiger just lead a $50 million Series B into the company? Nacelle is a headless commerce solution. And Tiger just backed it because it’s a headless commerce solution. If that makes sense.
• Hitting the TechCrunch website just after we capped off the Daily Crunch draft yesterday, Ron Miller and I put together some notes on what Databricks might look like at a $38 billion valuation. Enjoy!

Let’s make a deal: A crash course on corporate development

Venrock Vice President Todd Graham has some frank advice for founders at venture-backed startups: “It would be wise to generate a return at some point.”

With that in mind, he authored a primer on corporate development that lays out the three most common categories of acquisitions, tips for dealing with bankers and explains why striking a partnership with a big company isn’t always the best way forward.

Regardless of the path you choose, “you need to take the meeting,” advises Graham.

“In the worst-case scenario, you’ll get a few new LinkedIn connections and you’re now a known quantity. The best-case scenario will be a second meeting.”

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

Big Tech Inc.

• Twitter’s newsletter push is just getting started: Twitter is building out better integrations between its Revue newsletter service and its main interface. This is not a surprise, but is welcome all the same. Whether Twitter can become a material anti-Substack is not yet clear.
• Facebook wants to eat TikTok’s lunch: Facebook is bringing its Reels product to the United States. So, if you prefer Facebook to own your data instead of a ByteDance subsidiary, here’s your chance.
• Congress wants to eat TikTok’s lunch: Speaking of ByteDance, TikTok’s plans to collect biometric data of its user base is not popular in the U.S. Congress. This is not a surprise. Especially because the Chinese Communist Party takes a board seat in ByteDance’s key China-based company.
• GM wants to put 5G in your ride: From an entirely orthogonal corner of the technology universe, GM is working with U.S. telco AT&T to put 5G into cars. I don’t know precisely why we need this, or if there is enough 5G juice really out there to even squeeze out a single glass of lemonade, but here it is all the same.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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Testimonial: “[I] did a fairly extensive search for a content partner. [I] was impressed with their expertise, their references (I spoke to three) and their growth forecasting.”