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News: African fintech OPay reportedly raising $400M at $1.5B valuation

  • May 26, 2021
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Chinese-backed and Africa-focused fintech platform OPay is in talks to raise up to $400 million, The Information reported today. The fundraising will be coming two years after OPay announced two funding rounds in 2019 — $50 million in June and $120 million Series B in November. The $170 million raised so far comes from mainly

Chinese-backed and Africa-focused fintech platform OPay is in talks to raise up to $400 million, The Information reported today. The fundraising will be coming two years after OPay announced two funding rounds in 2019 — $50 million in June and $120 million Series B in November.

The $170 million raised so far comes from mainly Chinese investors who, over the past few years, have begun to bet big on Africa. Some of them include SoftBank, Sequoia Capital China, IDG Capital, SoftBank Ventures Asia, GSR Ventures, Source Code Capital.

In 2018, Opera popularly known for its internet search engine and browser, launched the OPay mobile money platform in Lagos. It didn’t take long for the company to start expanding aggressively within the city using ORide, a now-defunct ride-hailing service as an entry point to the array of services it wanted to offer. The company has tested a number of verticals — OBus, a bus-booking platform (also defunct); OExpress, a logistics delivery service; OTrade, a B2B e-commerce platform; OFood, a food delivery service, among others.

While none of these services has significantly scaled, OPay’s fintech and mobile money arm (which is its main play) is thriving. This year, its parent company Opera reported that OPay’s monthly transactions grew 4.5x last year to over $2 billion in December. OPay also claims to process about 80% of bank transfers among mobile money operators in Nigeria as well as 20% of the country’s non-merchant point of sales transactions.

Last year, the company also said it acquired an international money transfer license with a partnership with WorldRemit also in the works.

It’s quite surprising that none of OPay’s plans to expand to South Africa and Kenya (countries it expressed interest in during its Series B) has come to fruition despite its large raises. The company blamed the pandemic for these shortcomings. However, earlier this year the country set up shop in North Africa by expanding to Egypt. This next raise which might be a Series C will be instrumental in the company’s quest for expansion, both geographically and in product offerings. Per The Information, OPay’s valuation will increase to about $1.5 billion, three times its worth in 2019.

We reached out to OPay but they declined to comment on the story.

News: Italy’s Commerce Layer raises $16M led by Coatue for its headless commerce platform

  • May 26, 2021
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“Headless” commerce — a set of tools that companies can use with their own customized front ends to build apps for selling goods and services — have become a huge business, not just because companies are seeing a bigger demand than ever before for people buying online, but because those companies are generally more focused

“Headless” commerce — a set of tools that companies can use with their own customized front ends to build apps for selling goods and services — have become a huge business, not just because companies are seeing a bigger demand than ever before for people buying online, but because those companies are generally more focused in their own strategies around how and what they want to present to the world.

Today, one of the companies building headless tools is announcing a round of funding as it continues to expand its business.

Commerce Layer, which provides a set of APIs for businesses to build e-commerce apps with their own, customized front ends, has raised $16 million — money that it will be using to continue expanding its business and adding more commerce tools into its API library.

Currently Commerce Layer provides tools to build your own mobile, wearable and voice apps, point of sale solutions, subscriptions, and multi-vendor commerce models (as you might have in a marketplace), along with services like building your own shopping carts and turning print catalogues into interactive, “shoppable” digital experiences.

Filippo Conforti, the CEO and co-founder, said it plans to bring in a lot of new features. On the roadmap are new developer dashboard, a command-line interface (CLI) and order management system, and a hosted checkout application, metrics API, a reporting application, and better support for subscription and marketplace models.

This latest Series B round is being led by Coatue Management, with general partner Caryn Marooney (who has led comms at Facebook, among many other high-ranking comms roles) taking a seat on Commerce Layer’s board. Previous investors Benchmark and Mango Capital also participated. Benchmark led Commerce Layer’s Series A about a year ago.

That round came at a very key moment for the startup. Based just outside of Florence, Italy, and coming just on the heels of the first rush of Covid-19 cases in Europe — where for a time Italy was the epicenter of the pandemic — it was an early sign not just of how startups were able to keep working, but how investors were willing to back the best of them, even in times of uncertainty.

It also turned out that e-commerce became one of the big stories out of 2020, as more consumers went to digital channels to shop at a time when they couldn’t go to stores as easily, if at all.

That has definitely had a knock-on effect for Commerce Layer. Conforti told me that the company saw its revenues grow 6x in the last year — albeit it was starting from a small place, with only six customers on its books back in May 2020. It now has around 26 businesses using its tools, he said, including Chilly’s, Brioni, SumUp, Paradox Interactive and Coca Cola Embonor (a company that works under a Coca Cola license to make and distribute drinks in Chile and Bolivia).

The interesting thing about “headless” platforms is that they are becoming a much bigger part of the equation whe it comes to building and running e-commerce experiences. That seems to be a sign not just of how the sector continues to mature in terms of retailers and how they are looking for more than a plug-and-play, one-size-fits-most approach in their own strategies. It also speaks to the growing range of permutations of how and where people sell today, and the need for tools to address that.

While Commercetools is one of the bigger “headless” commerce providers, and whose founder even coined the term “headless commerce”, there are a number of others now building tools to help companies build more unique e-commerce experiences, including the likes of Spryker, Swell, Fabric, Chord, and Shogun. Even Shopify has stepped into the fray with Shopify Plus.

“eCommerce has become core to our everyday lives. As a result, big brands and enterprises need better ways to shift from retail and build exceptional online storefronts. We believe that Commerce Layer is building the API platform for this new category, and we’re incredibly proud to join them in pursuing their ambitious and exciting vision,” said Marooney in a statement.

News: General Motors, Lockheed Martin to develop new lunar rover for NASA Artemis missions to the moon

  • May 26, 2021
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The last time humans visited the moon in 1972, they got around on a relatively simple battery-powered vehicle. As NASA prepares for the next crewed mission to the moon, it’s looking to give the lunar rover an upgrade. Lockheed Martin and General Motors said Wednesday they’re working together to develop a next-generation lunar vehicle designed

The last time humans visited the moon in 1972, they got around on a relatively simple battery-powered vehicle. As NASA prepares for the next crewed mission to the moon, it’s looking to give the lunar rover an upgrade.

Lockheed Martin and General Motors said Wednesday they’re working together to develop a next-generation lunar vehicle designed to be faster and capable of traveling farther distances than its predecessor. If the project is selected by NASA, the rover would be used on the upcoming Artemis missions. The first mission, which will be an uncrewed test flight, is scheduled for November. The request for proposals will likely be published in the third or fourth quarter of this year, executives said at a media briefing Wednesday. NASA will award the contract after evaluating the submitted proposals.

The previous rover was only capable of traveling less than five miles from the Apollo landing site, limiting the astronauts’ ability to collect important data on far-flung lunar locales, like the north and south poles. The Moon’s circumference is nearly 7,000 miles. The two companies are aiming to improve the specs, Lockheed’s VP for lunar exploration Kirk Shireman said, noting that the exact materials used for the new rover, its range and other capabilities have yet to be determined.

GM will also be developing an autonomous driving system for the rover, which executives said Wednesday will improve safety and the ability for astronauts to collect samples and conduct other scientific research. GM is investing more than $27 billion through 2025 in electric and autonomous vehicle technologies and it aims to bring that research to the lunar rover project, Jeffrey Ryder, VP of growth and strategy at GM Defense, said. “We’re heads-down right now in investigating how we would take those capabilities and apply them to specific missions and operation associated with the Artemis program.”

GM also said it will be using its earth-bound research into battery and propulsion systems in developing the rover. Ryder anticipates that the rover program will lead to other market opportunities.

Both companies have supplied technology for NASA missions before, including its lunar missions. Auto manufacturer GM helped develop the previous lunar rover that was used during the Apollo era, including its chassis and wheels. It also manufactured and integrated guidance and navigational systems for the program. Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin’s experience extends to building spacecraft and power systems that have been included on every NASA mission to Mars.

The companies said this was “one of several initiatives” they’re working on together, with further announcements regarding other projects expected in the future.

News: Prismic raises $20 million for its headless CMS

  • May 26, 2021
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Prismic, a company building a content management system, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. While the startup has been profitable since 2016, it wants to unlock the full potential of its headless CMS by iterating more quickly on its product. Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo are co-leading today’s funding round. Headless content management

Prismic, a company building a content management system, has raised a $20 million Series A funding round. While the startup has been profitable since 2016, it wants to unlock the full potential of its headless CMS by iterating more quickly on its product. Aglaé Ventures and Eurazeo are co-leading today’s funding round.

Headless content management systems are a bit different from traditional content management systems. The backend and the frontend of your website operate totally separately. You write content in the backend where it is safely stored. The frontend of your application fetches content from the backend using an API and display it to your customers and readers.

Dissociating those two key parts of your content management system provides many advantages. It is more secure, it scales much better and it gives you a ton of flexibility when it comes to frontend framework and hosting.

In addition to iterating on its CMS, Prismic manages the infrastructure for you. When you sign up, you don’t have to deploy the backend on your own server. You can connect to the admin interface and start building.

After that, your content is accessible through an API. It means that you can build your own website and fetch content from Prismic. You can also build a mobile app and use Prismic as your content backend for the news section.

You can pick your own framework and build your site through that framework. Prismic supports Gatsby, React.js, Next.js, Vue.js and more.

Prismic is also trying to popularize something called slices. Traditional content management systems let you create pages or posts. Each page uses the same header and footer. It’s just a unit of content enclosed in your website.

Slices are vertical sections of your websites, such as a banner at the top, a section with featured content, some related content, recent reviews, a newsletter sign-up form, etc. Developers can create their own custom slices using React.js, Vue.js and others.

After that, the content marketing team can mix and match slices as well as customize them whenever they’re creating a new page. It unlocks more potential and lets non-technical people create dynamic content for a website. Essentially, Prismic is adding some no-code features to its CMS with those slices.

“Prismic becomes a page builder for the marketing team. From there, they can access all sections of the site and can compose new pages by piecing together those slices and by adding content,” co-founder and CEO Sadek Drobi told me.

That concept in particular seems to have some potential. That’s why the company is raising some money. The startup generates revenue from subscriptions and targets small clients, such as web agencies, as well as big companies that subscribe to enterprise plans.

News: Merlin Labs emerges from stealth to bring autonomy to 55-King Air fleet

  • May 26, 2021
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When Merlin Labs founder Matt George was learning to fly in Vermont, he had a close call with a Jet Blue aircraft that was coming into Burlington airport. It was “an unsettling experience,” he told TechCrunch, but one that stuck with him. A few years later, after the transportation company he founded Bridgj was acquired

When Merlin Labs founder Matt George was learning to fly in Vermont, he had a close call with a Jet Blue aircraft that was coming into Burlington airport. It was “an unsettling experience,” he told TechCrunch, but one that stuck with him. A few years later, after the transportation company he founded Bridgj was acquired by Singapore-based Transit Systems, he started thinking about how he could bring the innovations that were taking place in autonomous ground transportation to the air.

Now, two-and-a-half years after founding Merlin Labs, the company is coming out of stealth with a 55-aircraft partnership with aviation solutions company Dynamic Aviation.  The company also announced that it has raised $3.5 million in seed funding and $21.5 million in Series A, led by First Round Capital and GV (formerly Google Ventures) respectively, with additional investments from Floodgate, Harpoon, WTI, Ben Ling, Box Group, Shrug Capital and Howard Morgan.

Merlin Labs’ has performed “a couple hundred” autonomous missions from takeoff to touchdown across the three generations of its experimental system, George said. It’s been conducting its flight tests from a dedicated facility at the Mojave Air & Space Port. The latest iteration, called Murray, is a few months old. He described the system as a drop-in autonomy kit that can be adapted across aircrafts. While there is a human pilot monitoring the aircraft on the ground that can take over in case of an emergency, planes retrofitted with Merlin Labs’ system operate on their own.

However, before the fleet of 55 King Air planes can take to the skies for commercial service, Merlin Labs still needs to get a supplemental type certification from the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration. George was unable to provide a timeline of when Merlin Labs might get the certification but it’s a necessary process in an industry that’s highly regulated and justifiably risk averse.

The company is also certifying capability to allow air traffic controllers to “talk” to the aircraft directly, using natural language processing so that the aircraft understands the words and can translate it into action. The plane will also be able to respond with “a high degree of cognition,” George said.

“We firmly believe that air traffic controllers need to be able to interact with the aircraft just like they would interact with any other aircraft,” he said. “There shouldn’t be any special interfaces. They should be able to go talk to it, have the aircraft perform those actions, and talk back. So that’s a really important part we’re working on.”

Looking to the future, George said that Merlin Labs has no intention of becoming an airline or operating planes themselves. Instead, it’s looking to provide autonomy as a service to more providers like Dynamic Aviation (which owns the largest private fleet of King Air planes) and logistics giants like UPS and FedEx.

“Autonomy is eating the world,” George said. “The opportunity to be able to go automate the airspace is really important, to be able to bring people together, to create digital infrastructure that connects the entire world.”

News: Peloton and Echelon profile photos exposed riders’ real-world locations

  • May 26, 2021
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Security researchers say at-home exercise giant Peloton and its closest rival Echelon were not stripping user-uploaded profile photos of their metadata, in some cases exposing users’ real-world location data. Almost every file, photo or document contains metadata, which is data about the file itself, such as how big it is, when it was created, and

Security researchers say at-home exercise giant Peloton and its closest rival Echelon were not stripping user-uploaded profile photos of their metadata, in some cases exposing users’ real-world location data.

Almost every file, photo or document contains metadata, which is data about the file itself, such as how big it is, when it was created, and by whom. Photos and video will often also include the location from where they were taken. That location data helps online services tag your photos or videos that you were at this restaurant or that other landmark.

But those online services — especially social platforms, where you see people’s profile photos — are supposed to remove location data from the file’s metadata so other users can’t snoop on where you’ve been, since location data can reveal where you live, work, where you go, and who you see. Others have been slow to adopt metadata stripping, like Slack, even if it got there in the end.

Jan Masters, a security researcher at Pen Test Partners, found the metadata exposure as part of a wider look at Peloton’s leaky API. TechCrunch verified the bug by uploading a profile photo with GPS coordinates of our New York office, and checking the metadata of the file while it was on the server.

The bugs were privately reported to both Peloton and Echelon.

Peloton fixed its API issues earlier this month but said it needed more time to fix the metadata bug and to strip existing profile photos of any location data. A Peloton spokesperson confirmed the bugs were fixed last week. Echelon fixed its version of the bug earlier this month. But TechCrunch held this report until we had confirmation that both companies had fixed the bug and that metadata had been stripped from old profile photos.

It’s not known how long the bug existed or if anyone maliciously exploited it to scrape users’ personal information. Any copies, whether cached or scraped, could represent a significant privacy risk to users whose location identifies their home address, workplace, or other private location.

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News: Datacy raises $2.4M to help consumers monetize their own damn data

  • May 26, 2021
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This morning Datacy, a startup with its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, announced that it has closed $2.4 million in new funding to continue building its consumer-friendly data collection and monetization service. The company is effectively an argument that the preceding sentence is possible. Datacy is a tool that allows individuals to collect their browsing data,

This morning Datacy, a startup with its headquarters in Wilmington, Delaware, announced that it has closed $2.4 million in new funding to continue building its consumer-friendly data collection and monetization service.

The company is effectively an argument that the preceding sentence is possible. Datacy is a tool that allows individuals to collect their browsing data, manage it, have it anonymized and aggregated with others and then sold. The end-user gets 85% of the resulting revenue, while Datacy takes 15%.

Its model has found financial backing, with its new capital coming from Trend Forward Capital, Truesight Ventures, Redhawk VC, the Female Founders Alliance and others. The startup raised the funds using a convertible note that was capped at $9.5 million, though TechCrunch is not certain whether or not there were other terms associated with the fundraising mechanism.

Regardless, Datacy’s model fits into the modestly more privacy-forward stance that the technology world has taken in recent years; Apple is not the only company looking to make hay off of what some consider to be rising consumer interest in keeping their activities, and data, to themselves. But what Datacy wants to do is merge the consumer privacy impulse with profit.

According to company co-founder Paroma Indilo, her startup is not a cookie blocker. She told TechCrunch that if someone wants to block data collection, there are good tools for the task in the market already. What Datacy wants to do, she said, is evolve from its current status as a control platform to the way that data is shared and exchanged, built atop user consent. With monetization, we’d add.

It’s a better vision for the future than the hellscape adtech and data-vendor market that we’ve become accustomed to.

Today the startup has live beta users, allowing it to learn and collect initial data. The company is waiting to make the business side of its operation open to all until it has 50,000 users; Indilo told TechCrunch that individual data is not worth much, but in aggregate it can be worth quite a lot. So to see the startup wait to scale up its sales operations until it has a larger user base is reasonable.

It may not be too long until Datacy reaches that 50,000 user mark. From a current base of 10,000, and what Indilo described as 30% monthly growth via word of mouth, it could hit that mark in a half-year or so.

Datacy is one of those early-stage bets that has a lot of potential, but also a notable helping of risk. If it can attract the masses it needs to prove out the economics of its model, its payments to its user base could make growth a self-fulfilling destiny. But if its ability to garner more users slows, it could fail to reach sufficient scale for its model to work whatsoever.

So it’s a good use of venture capital, in other words. We’ll check back in with Datacy in a few months to see how close it is to its 50,000 user goal. And how its bet that consumers want their data back is playing out.

News: Databricks introduces Delta Sharing, an open source tool for sharing data

  • May 26, 2021
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Databricks launched its fifth open source project today, a new tool called Delta Sharing designed to be a vendor neutral way to share data with any cloud infrastructure or SaaS product, so long as you have the appropriate connector. It’s part of the broader Databricks open source Delta Lake project. As CEO Ali Ghodsi points

Databricks launched its fifth open source project today, a new tool called Delta Sharing designed to be a vendor neutral way to share data with any cloud infrastructure or SaaS product, so long as you have the appropriate connector. It’s part of the broader Databricks open source Delta Lake project.

As CEO Ali Ghodsi points out, data is exploding and moving data from Point A to Point B is an increasingly difficult problem to solve with proprietary tooling. “The number one barrier for organizations to succeed with data is sharing data, sharing it between different views, sharing it across organizations — that’s the number one issue we’ve seen in organizations,” Ghodsi explained.

Delta Sharing is an open source protocol designed to solve that problem. “This is the industry’s first ever open protocol, an open standard for sharing a data set securely. […] They can standardize on Databricks or something else. For instance, they might have standardized on using AWS Data Exchange, Power BI or Tableau — and they can then access that data securely.”

The tool is designed to work with multiple cloud infrastructure and SaaS services and out of the gate there are multiple partners involved including the Big Three cloud infrastructure vendors Amazon, Microsoft and Google, as well as data visualization and management vendors like Qlik, Starburst, Collibra and Alation and data providers like Nasdaq, S&P and Foursquare

Ghodsi said the key to making this work is the open nature of the project. By doing that and donating it to The Linux Foundation, he is trying to ensure that it can work across different environments. Another big aspect of this is the partnerships and the companies involved. When you can get big name companies involved in a project like this, it’s more likely to succeed because it works across this broad set of popular services. In fact, there are a number of connectors available today, but Databricks expects that number to increase over time as contributors build more connectors to other services.

Databricks operates on a consumption pricing model much like Snowflake, meaning the more data you move through its software, the more money it’s going to make, but the Delta Sharing tool means you can share with anyone, not just another Databricks customer. Ghodsi says that the open source nature of Delta Sharing means his company can still win, while giving customers more flexibility to move data between services.

The infrastructure vendors also love this model because the cloud data lake tools move massive amounts of data through their services and they make money too, which probably explains why they are all on board with this.

One of the big fears of modern cloud customers is being tied to a single vendor as they often were in the 1990s and early 2000s when most companies bought a stack of services from a single vendor like Microsoft, IBM or Oracle. On one hand, you had the veritable single throat to choke, but you were beholden to the vendor because the cost of moving to another one was prohibitively high. Companies don’t want to be locked in like that again and open source tooling is one way to prevent that.

Databricks was founded in 2013 and has raised almost $2 billion since. The latest round was in February for $1 billion at a $28 billion valuation, an astonishing number for a private company. Snowflake, a primary competitor, went public last September. As of today, it has a market cap of over $66 billion.

News: EV fast charger developer Tritium to go public via SPAC merger at $1.2B valuation

  • May 26, 2021
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Another day, another mobility SPAC deal. This time, it’s Tritium, a Brisbane-based developer and producer of direct current fast EV chargers that is taking the SPAC path to the public market in a deal valuing the company at $1.2 billion. Tritium said Wednesday it will be heading to the Nasdaq via a merger with special

Another day, another mobility SPAC deal. This time, it’s Tritium, a Brisbane-based developer and producer of direct current fast EV chargers that is taking the SPAC path to the public market in a deal valuing the company at $1.2 billion.

Tritium said Wednesday it will be heading to the Nasdaq via a merger with special purpose acquisition company Decarbonization Plus Acquisition Corp. II, or DCRN. The transaction is expected to generate gross proceeds of up to $403 million. Tritium will be listed under the ticker “DCFC.” This particular SPAC deal is unusual in that it does not include private investment in public equity, or PIPE — a fundraising round that typically occurs at the time of the merger and injects more capital into the company.

Founded in 2001, Tritium manufactures charger hardware and software for direct current fast chargers. Its products can recharge an EV battery, adding 20 miles in a minute or 100 miles in five minutes, DPAC II chairman Robert Tichio said during an investors call Wednesday. DC chargers are more costly than alternating current (AC) chargers but they send power to the vehicle much more quickly. Generally, AC chargers are installed at home, where a driver can plug in their vehicle overnight, while DC chargers are more frequently found at public charging stations.

“Drivers will want the experience of public charging to be as close as possible to their current experience at the gas pump – just a few minutes to get enough range to get on with your day,” Hunter said.

Tritium’s largest market is Europe, which composes around 70% of the company’s revenue, followed by North America at 20% and Asia at 10%, Tritium CEO Jane Hunter told investors Wednesday. The company will use the capital from the transaction to expand its manufacturing capacity and grow sales.

Demand for public EV charging stations is expected to mushroom over the next two decades alongside the growing market share of EVs. According to analysts Grandview Research, the EV charging infrastructure market was valued at $2 billion in 2020. It is expected to grow by nearly 39% through 2028. President Joe Biden said building out a national EV charging network was a key priority under his proposed $2 trillion infrastructure plan.

News: Rock-picking robotics startup TerraClear raises $25 million

  • May 26, 2021
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Rock picking is probably not the first thing you think about when you think agricultural robotics. Understandably so. There are a number of companies out there looking to automate aspects like fruit and vegetable picking, weeding and field tending, but rocks are still a major issue for many farmers. They’re big, they’re heavy and they

Rock picking is probably not the first thing you think about when you think agricultural robotics. Understandably so. There are a number of companies out there looking to automate aspects like fruit and vegetable picking, weeding and field tending, but rocks are still a major issue for many farmers. They’re big, they’re heavy and they can really mess up a piece of machinery.

“This is something I’ve personally dealt with my entire life,” TerraClear CEO Brent Frei said in a press release. “There are more than 400 million arable acres worldwide that have been waiting for a cost-effective and productive solution to this problem. Repetitive tasks like this are optimal targets for automation, and the technologies we are bringing to the field dramatically reduce the labor and time needed to prep fields for planting.”

TerraClear has built an automated robotic solution, capable of picking up to 400 rocks per hour and picking and moving ones weighing up to 300 pounds. Back in 2019, the Bellevue, Washington-based company announced a $6 million raise to expand its offering, and today it has announced a $25 million Series A.

Madrona Venture Group returns to lead the round, which brings its total funding up to $38 million. The funding will go toward scaling up the company’s production and sales for next year, as well as growing headcount. TerraClear’s Rock Picker robot is now up for preorder. The system works with mapping and third-party drone systems, using AI to identify large rocks, which the robot can then be deployed to clear out.

 

  


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