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News: Adobe delivers native Photoshop for Apple Silicon Macs and a way to enlarge images without losing detail

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Adobe has been moving quickly to update its imaging software to work natively on Apple’s new in-house processors for Macs, starting with the M1-based MacBook Pro and MacBook Air released late last year. After shipping native versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw, it’s now releasing an Apple Silicon-optimized version of Photoshop, which delivers big performance

Adobe has been moving quickly to update its imaging software to work natively on Apple’s new in-house processors for Macs, starting with the M1-based MacBook Pro and MacBook Air released late last year. After shipping native versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw, it’s now releasing an Apple Silicon-optimized version of Photoshop, which delivers big performance gain vs. the Intel version running on Apple’s Rosetta 2 software emulation layer.

How much better? Per internal testing, Adobe says that users should see improvements of up to 1.5x faster performance on a number of different features offered by Photoshop, vs. the same tasks being done on the emulated version. That’s just the start, however, since Adobe says it’s going to continue to coax additional performance improvements out of the software on Apple Silicon in collaboration with Apple over time. Some features are also still missing from the M1-friendly addition, including the ‘Invite to Edit Cloud Documents’ and ‘Preset Syncing’ options, but those will be ported over in future iterations as well.

In addition to the Apple Silicon version of Photoshop, Adobe is also releasing a new Super Resolution feature in the Camera Raw plugin (to be released for Lightroom later) that ships with the software. This is an image enlarging feature that uses machine learning trained on a massive image dataset to blow up pictures to larger sizes while still preserving details. Adobe has previously offered a super resolution option that combined multiple exposures to boost resolution, but this works from a single photo.

It’s the classic ‘Computer, enhance’ sci-fi feature made real, and it builds on work that Photoshop previously did to introduce its ‘Enhance details’ feature. If you’re not a strict Adobe loyalist, you might also be familiar with Pixelmator Pro’s ‘ML Super Resolution’ feature, which works in much the same way – albeit using a different ML model and training data set.

Adobe’s Super Resolution in action

The bottom line is that Adobe’s Super Resolution will output an image with twice the horizontal and twice the vertical resolution – meaning in total, it has 4x the number of pixels. It’ll do that while preserving detail and sharpness, which adds up to allowing you to make larger prints from images that previously wouldn’t stand up to that kind of enlargement. It’s also great for cropping in on photos in your collection to capture tighter shots of elements that previously would’ve been rendered blurry and disappointing as a result.

This feature benefits greatly from GPUs that are optimized for machine learning jobs, including CoreML and Windows ML. That means that Apple’s M1 chip is a perfect fit, since it includes a dedicated ML processing region called the Neural Engine. Likewise, Nvidia’s RTX series of GPUs and their TensorCores are well-suited to the task.

Adobe also released some major updates for Photoshop for iPad, including version history for its Cloud Documents non-local storage. You can also now store versions of Cloud Documents offline and edit them locally on your device.

News: Israel’s Retrain.ai closes $13M to use AI to understand early signals in the changing jobs market

• March 10, 2021
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Israel’s retrain.ai, which uses AI and Machine Learning to read job boards at scale and to gain insight into where the job market is going, has closed $9M Series A led by Square Peg. Since retrain.ai’s $4M seed round last year was unannounced (led by Hetz Ventures, with TechAviv and .406 Ventures participating) that means it’s

Israel’s retrain.ai, which uses AI and Machine Learning to read job boards at scale and to gain insight into where the job market is going, has closed $9M Series A led by Square Peg. Since retrain.ai’s $4M seed round last year was unannounced (led by Hetz Ventures, with TechAviv and .406 Ventures participating) that means it’s raised a total of $13 million. It’s competitors include Pymetrics which has raised $56.6M and Eightfold.ai which has raised $176.8M.

As well as the funding, the company has secured a first deal with the Israeli Department of Labor to look at the changing nature of the Israeli job market in light of the pandemic.

With technology eating into the traditional labour market, retrain.ai says its platform can look at what jobs are being advertised, which jobs are going down in popularity and see early-warning signals as to where new jobs are going to appear from. This can help form policy for large organiations and governments.

retrain.ai’s CEO is Dr. Shay David, who is best known for co-founding the video enterprise leader Kaltura, which first appeared at TehcCrunch’s first ever conference in 2007. Isabelle Bichler-Eliasaf is the company’s COO and Avi Simon, is retrain.ai’s CTO.

Dr. Shay David said: “What was once the regular tide of change in the workforce has evolved into a tsunami, especially pronounced by COVID-19 and its huge impact on the labor market– this has been a wake-up call. Unemployment and underemployment  is going to affect a billion people globally in the next few decades. Our vision is to help 10 million workers get the right jobs by 2025 and help organizations navigate efficiently through the wave of change.”
 
retrain.ai is the first investment by Square Peg’s new $450M fund. The VC previously invested in Canva, Stripe, Fiverr and Airwallex.

News: TikTok rolls out new commenting features aimed at preventing bullying

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On the heels of last week’s launch of a new Q&A format for creators responding to viewer questions, TikTok today announced it’s rolling out new commenting features. Creators will now be able to control which comments can be posted on their content, before those comments go live. Another new addition, aimed at users who are

On the heels of last week’s launch of a new Q&A format for creators responding to viewer questions, TikTok today announced it’s rolling out new commenting features. Creators will now be able to control which comments can be posted on their content, before those comments go live. Another new addition, aimed at users who are commenting, will pop up a box that prompts the user to reconsider posting a comment that may be inappropriate or unkind.

TikTok says the goal with the new features is to maintain a supportive, positive environment where people can focus on being creative and finding community.

Image Credits: TikTok

Instead of reactively removing offensive comments, creators who choose to use the new “Filter All Comments” feature will instead get to choose which comments appear on their videos. When enabled, they’ll need to go through each comment individually to approve them using a new comment management tool.

This feature builds on TikTok’s existing comment controls, which allow creators to filter spam and other offensive comments or filter by keywords, similar to other social apps like Instagram.

Image Credits: TikTok

But Filter All Comments means comments won’t even go live at all unless the creator approves them. This gives creators full control over their presence on the platform and could prevent bullying and abuse. But it also could allow creators to get away with spreading false information without any pushback, or making it seem like they’re more well liked than they actually are. That could be troublesome — especially since brands making decisions about which creators to work with to promote their products could be getting the wrong impression about a user’s likability.

The other feature will instead push users to reconsider posting bad comments — meaning those that appear to be bullying or inappropriate. It will also remind users of TikTok’s Community Guidelines and allows users to edit their comments before sharing.

Image Credits: TikTok

These sort of “nudges” help by slowing people down and giving them time to pause and think about what they’re saying, instead of being so quick to react. Already, TikTok is using nudges to ask users whether or not they want to share unsubstantiated claims that fact checkers can’t verify, in an attempt to slow the spread of misinformation.

It took other social networks years to add prompts that ask users to stop and think before posting. Instagram, for example, launched in 2010 but it was nearly a decade later before it decided to try a feature that prompted users to reconsider before posting offensive comments. Twitter, meanwhile, just last month said it was running another test that asks users to reconsider harmful replies. It’s been running variations of this same test for nearly a year.

Social networks have been hesitant to build in more prompts like this to their platforms, even though they’ve demonstrated a strong ability to influencer user actions. When Twitter began prompting users to read articles linked in a tweet before retweeting, for instance, users would open those articles 40% more often. But more often that not, networks choose to downrank or hide negative comments, like Instagram does with “View Hidden Comments” or Twitter with “Hide Replies.” 

TikTok says it’s consulting with industry partners in developing its new policies and features, and today also announced a partnership with the Cyberbullying Research Center (CRC), which develops research around cyberbullying and online abuse and misuse. The company says it will collaborate with CRC to develop other initiatives going forward to help promote a positive environment.

News: Tetrate, the company born out of Istio’s open source app networking project, raises $40 million

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Tetrate, the company commercializing an open source networking project that allows for easier data sharing across different applications, has raised $40 million. The round, led by Sapphire Ventures underscores the importance of the Istio project and just how critical services that facilitate cross-platform data sharing have become. Sapphire was joined by other new investors including Scale

Tetrate, the company commercializing an open source networking project that allows for easier data sharing across different applications, has raised $40 million.

The round, led by Sapphire Ventures underscores the importance of the Istio project and just how critical services that facilitate cross-platform data sharing have become.

Sapphire was joined by other new investors including Scale Venture Partners and NTTVC, along with existing investors, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, 8VC, and Samsung NEXT.

The company said it would use the cash to further develop its hybrid cloud application networking platform and support a new product, based on Istio, that makes the application service mesh easier to use, according to a statement from the company. Geographic expansion to Latin America, Europe and Asia is also on the menu now that it has 40 million simoleons to play around with (personally I’d have converted all that money into bills and gone swimming in it like Scrooge McDuck).

“As the microservices revolution picks up steam, it’s indispensable to use Istio for managing applications built with microservices and deployed on containers. Both the product and background of the founding team lead us to believe that Tetrate is poised to bring Istio into the mainstream for enterprises by making it easy to manage and deploy on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments,” said Jai Das, the partner, president and co-founder of Sapphire’s multi-billion dollar firm, who’s joining the Tetrate board. “The applications we use daily require a lot of work in the background, and Tetrate helps make that happen with its Istio-based service mesh technology, which helps route traffic between microservices, add visibility and enhance security.”

Founded in 2018, Tetrate formally launched in 2019 with a $12.5 million round that boosted the company’s profile and helped the company commercialize and professionalize services around the Istio and Envoy Proxy open source projects.

Tons of really big customers, including the U.S. Department of Defense use Tetrate’s services currently. In the military, Tetrate powers the DevSecOps platform called Platform One.

“We partnered with Tetrate to help secure and smoothly operate Platform One with Istio. Platform One works with the most critical systems across the DoD. The Tetrate team has provided world class expertise, trained our team members, reviewed our platform architecture and configurations, and helped with debugging and upgrades,” said Nicolas Chaillan, the chief software officer for the US Air Force, in a statement. “We’re getting excellent production support for running our platform smoothly and we rely on them and their platform for a critical layer of our stack.”

News: Join Sarah Kunst and Julia Collins for a live Q&A today at noon PT/3pm ET

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Julia Collins is the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn in the form of Zume, a robotics company that cooked pizzas and delivered them at the same time. The company attracted investment from Softbank and was valued at a reported $2.25 billion in 2019, but ultimately didn’t live up to expectations. Collins is now

Julia Collins is the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn in the form of Zume, a robotics company that cooked pizzas and delivered them at the same time. The company attracted investment from Softbank and was valued at a reported $2.25 billion in 2019, but ultimately didn’t live up to expectations.

Collins is now on to her next venture in the form of Planet FWD, which has attracted funding from a number of investors including BBG Ventures, Emerson Capital and Cleo Capital.

Today, on Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with Collins and Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst. We’ll chat about what was learned from Zume and how that is shaping Planet FWD, as well as Kunst’s interest in sustainability startups and why she bet on Collins. We’ll also talk about how founders can make the most of their pitch meetings, particularly in this virtual environment, and how to work with their investors and board members once they’ve landed the capital.

As with every episode of Extra Crunch Live, Kunst and Collins will give live feedback on pitch decks submitted by the audience in the Pitch Deck Teardown. If you want to share your pitch deck and get feedback from our experts on a future show, you can submit your deck here.

There is, however, one change to today’s show.

Extra Crunch members have always (and will always) had free access to Extra Crunch Live, both live and on demand. But today, we’ll also be selling tickets a la carte to the show. That’s right! Anyone can come hang out, ask their own questions to Collins and Kunst, and learn a thing or two from the seasoned experts.

The episode airs at 12pm PT/3pm ET today and will go for an hour.

You can hit up this link to either register (if you’re logged into Extra Crunch, the ticket is free) or purchase a ticket.

A full library of past episodes can be found here, and folks interested in checking out our future slate can find everything they need right here.

Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” to get 20 percent off at checkout right here.

News: Russia is trying to throttle Twitter

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In its latest strike against online content it doesn’t control Russia is throttling Twitter. State agency Roskomnadzor said today it was taking the action in response to the social media not removing banned content, claiming it had identified more than 3,000 unlawful posts that have not been taken down — and warning it could implement

In its latest strike against online content it doesn’t control Russia is throttling Twitter. State agency Roskomnadzor said today it was taking the action in response to the social media not removing banned content, claiming it had identified more than 3,000 unlawful posts that have not been taken down — and warning it could implement a total block on the service.

However the action by the comms regulator to slow down all Twitter’s mobile traffic and 50% of desktop users in Russia appeared to have briefly taken down Roskomnadzor’s own website earlier today.

Reports also circulated on social media that Russian government websites, including kremlin.ru, had been affected. At the time of writing these sites were accessible but earlier we were unable to access Roskomnadzor’s site.

The stand-off between the state agency and Twitter comes at a time when Russia is trying to clamp down on anti-corruption protestors who are supporters of the jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny — who has, in recent weeks, called for demonstrators to take to the streets to ramp up pressure on the regime.

Roskomnadzor’s statement makes no mention of the state’s push to censor political opposition — claiming only that the content it’s throttling Twitter for failing to delete is material relating to minors committing suicide; child pornography; and drug use. Hence it also claims to be taking the action to “protect Russian citizens”. However a draconian application of speech-chilling laws to try to silence political opposition are nothing new in Putin’s Russia.

The Russian regime has sought to get content it doesn’t like removed from foreign-based social media services a number of times in recent years, including — as now — resorting to technical means to limit access.

Most notoriously, back in 2018, an attempt by Russia to block access to the messaging service Telegram resulted in massive collateral damage to the local Internet as the block took down millions of (non-Telegram-related) IP addresses — disrupting those other services.

Also in 2018 Facebook-owned Instagram complied with a Russian request to remove content posted by Navalny — which earned it a shaming tweet from the now jailed politician.

Although now behind bars in Russia — Navalny was jailed in February, after Russia claimed he had violated the conditions of a suspended sentence — the prominent Putin critic has continued to use his official Twitter account as a megaphone to denounce corruption and draw attention to the injustice of his detention, following his attempted poisoning last year (which has been linked to Russia’s FSB).

Recent tweets from Navalny’s account include amplification of an investigation by the German newspaper Bild into RT DE, the Russian state-controlled media outlet Russia Today’s German channel — which the newspaper accuses of espionage in German targeting Navalny and his associates (he was staying in a German hospital in Berlin at the time, recovering from the attempted poisoning).

Slowing down access to Twitter is one way for Russia to try to put a lid on Navalny’s critical output on the platform — which also includes a recent retweet of a video claiming that Russian citizen’s taxes were used this winter by Putin and his cronies to fund yachts, whiskey and a Maldivian vacation.

Navalny’s account has also tweeted in recent hours to denounce his jailing by the Russian state following its attempt to poison him — saying: “This situation is called attempted murder”.

At the time of writing Twitter had not responded to requests for comment on Roskomnadzor’s action.

However last month, in a worrying development in India that’s also related to anti-government protests (in that case by farmers who are seeking to reverse moves to deregulate the market), Twitter caved in to pressure from the government — shuttering 500 accounts including some linked to the anti-government protests.

It also agreed to reduce the visibility of certain protest hashtags.

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News: LatAm corporate spend-management startup Clara raises $3.5M, comes out of stealth

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This morning Clara, a corporate spend-management startup focused on the Latin American market, announced its product launch and a $3.5 million pre-seed round led by General Catalyst. The company’s funding caught TechCrunch’s eye as there has been a flurry of funding for related companies serving the United States market. From Divvy to Brex to Ramp

This morning Clara, a corporate spend-management startup focused on the Latin American market, announced its product launch and a $3.5 million pre-seed round led by General Catalyst.

The company’s funding caught TechCrunch’s eye as there has been a flurry of funding for related companies serving the United States market. From Divvy to Brex to Ramp to Airbase to Teampay, investors have poured capital into startups working to help companies better track and manage their spend.

Companies working in the fintech niche tend to monetize in one of two ways, namely interchange revenues and software incomes. Or more simply, some in the corporate spend category generate revenues when users swipe cards, earning a slice of the transaction. And some also charge for the software that they have wrapped around their cards and other methods of payment.

Clara is in the first camp, making its revenues today from interchange incomes, according to Gerry Giacomán Colyer and Diego Iván García Escobedo, the company’s co-founders. Colyer is the company’s CEO, while García Escobedo heads its product and tech work.

The pair told TechCrunch that the Mexican interchange market is more akin to the United States’ own (lucrative) than Europe’s own (less lucrative), meaning that if the company can sign up a host of customers for its free service — empieza hoy – sin costo, its website intones — it could post the same sort of revenue growth that has spurred some of its American comps to huge venture capital raises.

The startup’s potential has caught the eye of more than General Catalyst, a well-known venture capital firm. The two co-founders of Ramp are also investors in Clara. The startup’s round also included funds from a host of smaller firms and angels, including Canary Ventures, Adapt Ventures and Picus Capital, among others.

The co-founders want to bridge the gap in technology-enabled financial services that they found in Mexico. Colyer worked for G2 after a stint at Stanford, eventually moving back to Mexico and working on a micromobility startup called Uva Scooters. He discovered during the process that Mexican and other Latin American firms lacked some digital tools, like low- and zero-cost corporate spend software, to which American companies had ample access.

So, the pair of founders, who met at Grin Scooters, which had acquired Uva, set out to build Clara, tuning a model with proven success in America to work in Mexico. What sort of tweaking was needed? Local compliance to ensure high-levels of card acceptance, support for local tax law and receipt management, the pair said.

Thus far the company has only worked with around 100 customers, with the co-founders telling TechCrunch they have seen traction with high-growth companies, some of which are startups. That echoes what Brex tapped into when it was a more youthful upstart itself.

Today the company operates in Mexico only, but intends to support other markets over time.

Regarding the company’s $3.5 million raise, like many pre-seed and seed deals, the funds were acquired in a few tranches, including one in May of 2020. The rest of the capital came later in the year.

Seeing successful startup models that are familiar in the United States pop up in Latin America is a regular trend. Belvo, for example, is following in the tracks that Plaid laid down, bringing fintech APIs to the LatAm market. Given rising smartphone penetration, and rising card usage, perhaps Clara will find a good fit in its home market.

Looking ahead, TechCrunch is curious how quickly Clara can accrete new customer companies now that it has formally launched. If it can, and the interchange game proves successful, expect to hear from it again soon.

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News: Optibus picks up $107M for an AI-based planning and operations platform aimed at mass transportation

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Mass transportation is a critical part of how metropolitan areas keep moving, and today a startup that has built an AI-based platform to help mass transportation work more efficiently is announcing a huge round of funding to grow its business and tackle a new set of opportunities and challenges in the modern city. Optibus —

Mass transportation is a critical part of how metropolitan areas keep moving, and today a startup that has built an AI-based platform to help mass transportation work more efficiently is announcing a huge round of funding to grow its business and tackle a new set of opportunities and challenges in the modern city.

Optibus — a Tel Aviv-based startup that provides a platform to analyze how vehicles and people move around in cities and then provides navigation, scheduling, driver rostering and other guidance for mass transportation providers to service those cities better — has picked up $107 million, a Series C that it will be using to continue expanding the kinds of services that it provides to customers.

This Series C is coming at the same time that the startup is launching a new Geospatial Suite that is part of that platform expansion. It provides tools to visualize and predict movement alongside different transportation options, fitting in with the shift that many cities are making to encouraging multi-modal travel covering buses, trains, bikes, scooters and walking to offset traffic congestion from single-passenger cars.

Meanwhile, Optibus’ customers include city governments and other companies and organizations that have implemented mass transportation systems (these include those who have large campuses, but also, for example, big tech companies that operate private shuttle services to bring users who live in one place to their headquarters in another); huge mass transportation providers; electric and other vehicle makers; and more.

In a city like London, CEO and co-founder Amos Haggiag says that it helps run 30% of the city’s public transportation, focused mainly around bus usage, and 25% of public transportation in the U.K. market overall.

The funding is being co-led by two investors, Bessemer Venture Partners and Insight Partners, with previous investors Verizon Ventures*, Pitango, New Era Capital Partners, Dynamic Loop and Blue Red Partners also participating. The company is not disclosing its valuation but Haggiag told me that it’s gone up 4X since its last round in 2018.

Indeed, this is a significant round for Optibus, which prior to this had only raised around $55 million since first opening for business in 2014. The size of this Series C underscores the company’s traction and also the potential opportunities of being a transportation data provider at the moment.

Cities exist between a rock and a hard place these days. They have to continue to focus on how to operate well while also getting increasingly crowded — a long-term trend that’s existed for decades. But now, on top of that, dense metro areas also have to figure out how to operate safely at a time when effective social distancing can make the difference between life and death. These two imperatives are often at odds with each other.

While you might assume that social distancing has meant less rather than more use of public transportation, you would be right, but that’s not the full story. Haggiag said that in the last year Optibus has had a surge of new business and increased usage from its customers, not because they are handling more passengers — some cities have seen as much as an 80% drop in passenger revenues, he said — but because buses and other transportation modes have remained running as essential services, but ones that need to be better organised and spaced out than ever before, in order to be run responsibly.

The role of a company like Optibus has been to bring technology into an equation that has been tackled mostly as an offline problem before now.

“People sit in a room to map these routes out. It’s very old school stuff,” said Haggiag. “There so much budget involved and also lots of data that no one uses. No one had previously tried to figure out the patterns.”

While cars have long been the default transportation option in many parts of the world for decades, we have seen a gradual shift even in the most unlikely of cities, like Los Angeles, where services are expanding not because people have suddenly decided they don’t love their cars, but because the growth in population has made the growth of more vehicles untenable. It’s led to a more extensive public transportation network, which has led to more people using it.

“Effective public transportation is a critical part of a well-functioning society, and with the rise of new mobility options and electric vehicles, paired with the added challenge of the pandemic, city operators face more complexity than ever,” said Alex Ferrara, Partner at Bessemer Venture Partners, in a statement. “Optibus stands out as a modern cloud-based solution that cuts through this complexity, allowing transit operators to plan routes and optimize schedules in minutes rather than days, promoting a more affordable and passenger-friendly experience. We are excited to partner with them as they build a global, world-class operating system for public transportation.”

*Disclosure: Verizon Ventures is part of Verizon, which owns TechCrunch. This did not influence my decision to cover this news.

News: Cheese raises $3.6M for its digital bank aimed at the Asian-American community

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Many things have accelerated in the world of fintech over the past year, not the least of which is the trend of digital banks aimed at specific communities in the U.S. In the past few months alone, a number of neobanks targeting the Black and Latinx communities have emerged. Most recently, we covered the $5

Many things have accelerated in the world of fintech over the past year, not the least of which is the trend of digital banks aimed at specific communities in the U.S.

In the past few months alone, a number of neobanks targeting the Black and Latinx communities have emerged. Most recently, we covered the $5 million raise of one such bank — First Boulevard.

Today, Cheese announced the launch of its digital banking platform that is aimed at primarily serving the Asian-American community. Co-founder and CEO Ken Lian came to the United States from China in 2008 to attend college. In the years after his move, Lian said he paid thousands of dollars in bank fees and got rejected “multiple times” for basic bank accounts, despite having a FICO score over 800.

Those experiences led him to come up with the concept behind Cheese, which he said will offer its banking services via a multi-language platform. The one-year-old startup also has a social component, giving customers a way to support Asian-American businesses and organizations. Lian is no stranger to the world of entrepreneurship, having also founded Moolah Science, a startup that helped consumers find out if online stores owed them a refund that got acquired by a Fortune 500 company in 2019.

Lian founded Cheese along with Zhen Wang and Qingyi Li under the premise that Asian-Americans are often subject to discrimination and “an unequal playing field” in America despite being among the most educated in the country.

“We understand Asian users much better than anybody else because we are the user,” Lian told TechCrunch. “[Traditional] banking didn’t understand me or my culture or my lifestyle or what matters to me. Our needs are different.”

“A lot of challenger banks also never focused on Asian communities and immigrants,” he added. “We want to provide a great product to welcome these people to the U.S. and make it easy for them to bank.”

Over the past year, Cheese has raised a total of $3.6 million in funding from investors such as iFly.vc; Amplify; Adam Nash, former CEO of Wealthfront; Zillow co-founder Spencer Rascoff and VC firms Wedbush Ventures, Idealab and Operate Venture Studio. The startup has also partnered with actor Jimmy Wong, an advocate for Asian rights. He will serve as Cheese’s chief community ambassador.

Cheese’s platform provides a debit Mastercard (issued by Coastal Community Bank), which is available to those with no credit history. (If this sounds familiar, it’s a similar offering as that of TomoCredit, a startup that recently raised $7 million to scale its debit card product for those with little or no credit history.)

Cheese cardholders can use the virtual cards instantly through their mobile wallets, the company said. Other features include offering advance pay up to two days early with direct deposit, a 3% deposit bonus for referring friends, 0.3% annual percentage yield (APY) and up to 10% cash back on purchases at more than10,000 merchants. 

Image Credits: Cheese

Han Shen, founding partner of iFly, believes Cheese can help the underbanked community in the United States.

“They don’t necessarily get the same kind of service or product for their banking needs and they face all kinds of pain points,” he wrote. “Cheese has a list of products they want to develop for that type of customer…We know there is a product market fit based on our research and we know this is a strong team.”

The investment marks iFly’s first in the consumer fintech space in which it acted as a lead investor.

“We were already determined to invest on the mission side. They wanted to make things easier and better for the underbanked, including immigrants,” Shen continued. “People deserve a better service. In Cheese’s case, the question is not whether or not to provide it, the question is about how to do it right to address their pain points.”

In conjunction with its launch, Cheese has pledged $100,000 to the Cheese Giveback Fund, 100% of which will be donated to nonprofits and community service programs in support of Asian neighborhoods and businesses impacted by violence and economic hardship during the COVID-19 pandemic.

News: Facebook targets emerging markets with the launch of Instagram Lite, an Android app that takes up just 2MB, in 170 countries

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Growth for Facebook is coming from the developing world, and so the social network today made another key move to cater better to consumers in those countries. After nearly three years in the planning, Facebook is taking the plunge today and officially launching Instagram Lite, a less data- and storage-intensive Android-only version of one of

Growth for Facebook is coming from the developing world, and so the social network today made another key move to cater better to consumers in those countries. After nearly three years in the planning, Facebook is taking the plunge today and officially launching Instagram Lite, a less data- and storage-intensive Android-only version of one of its popular photo and video app, which will take up just 2MB on a phone and is going live in 170 countries, with a focus on emerging markets, today.

Instagram Lite is launching with all the basic bells and whistles around editing, sharing and viewing photos and videos, as well as the ability to add stickers, create and view Stories, IGTV and the Explore discovery and recommendation algorithms. And given the launch across 170 countries, it’s coming with specific language support to be usable in those markets.

But to whittle down the experience from the 30MB that full-fat Instagram takes up on iOS and Android devices (and countless MB of mobile data usage), it’s launching without some things, too.

Namely, the developers have left out many graphics; they haven’t included advertising; and it’s missing some key features like dark mode, Shopping, and end-to-end encryption. (Notably, encryption was reportedly being worked on for the main app in 2019, but it has yet to launch). Nor are there iOS or feature phone versions of the app in the works.

Facebook said that some of that list — such as dark mode, and (of course) adverts — will be added in future updates.

Instagram Lite has been teased out in different forms by Facebook since 2018, and it’s hitting what has proven to be a receptive market for the social media giant. Tzach Hadar, Tel Aviv-based director of product management for all of Facebook’s Lite apps — which also include versions of Facebook and Messenger, also built in Tel Aviv — said this week that Facebook Lite now has more than 200 million monthly active users.

That’s just a fraction of the billions that use Facebook itself, but represents a key way of targeting those newer to Facebook or those who might not otherwise be using the app because of financial or bandwidth constraints.

But although Instagram is wildly popular and would have been an obvious candidate for the Lite treatment years ago, and Instagram Lite was one of the most requested items from users in developing markets, it has proven to be trickier beast.

That’s not just because the app focuses on images and videos, which by their nature use up more bandwidth and data; but because over the years Instagram has become increasingly laden with features: those aimed at enhancing the user experience; those aimed at competing better with other apps (hello, Stories); and those to extend monetization opportunities for Facebook.

“Instagram offered another kind of unique challenge for us to deliver under the same constraints the same experience,” said Nick Brown, a product manager based out of New York (the app was co-developed across Facebook’s Tel Aviv and NYC offices and — presumably, given the year we’ve had — across many Facebook employees’ homes). “The philosophy is really that we want to bring all of Instagram to these users.”

Image Credits: Facebook

Indeed, as with other Lite versions of apps like Facebook and Messenger, Instagram Lite is geared towards consumers in emerging economies, where smartphones are most likely to be Android-based and less likely to be top-of-the-range devices; consumers are more likely to be more price- and bandwidth-sensitive when it comes to using mobile data; and a substantial proportion are still only now getting to grips with being online.

Facebook notes estimates that show 65% of emerging market populations are online versus 90% in North America, which is one reason why the company focuses so squarely on serving those users: they represent growth at a time when growth has slowed down, or become significantly more competitive against newer entrants, in its more mature markets like the U.S. and Europe.

However, building for the demands of developing markets can often, by their nature, run counter to the concept of building in ever more features as you might otherwise see with highly competitive consumer apps.

The Instagram Lite app had some fits and starts over the years, with the first version, built on React Native, launching in a limited release back in 2018, taking up a mere 573kb of space on a device. It also came without a lot of features, but Instagram itself had less features, too. While it was never explained why, that version was quietly pulled last year, and then shortly after a newer version was launched again in December in a limited test. Debuted first in India, a key market for the company, Instagram Lite launched there with support for Bangla, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Punjabi, Tamil and Telugu.

And it’s that last test that has turned into the official Instagram Lite app. Interestingly, it turns out that in the process, the whole app was rebuilt, moving it away from Facebook’s own React Native framework and building it instead on an internal framework called Bloks (not to be confused with Bloks), heavy lifting a lot of the basic workings from Messenger and Facebook’s Lite versions. I’ve asked for more detail about this, and I wonder if it’s related to LightSpeed, which was a development shift that saw a lighter and new version of Messenger get released last year.

“Bloks is a framework that is much more performant and has more features and capabilities, and this new Instagram light application is built upon it,” said Hadar. “So it’s like a new app altogether.” It’s not clear what exactly happened behind the scenes leading to the previous app getting pulled, but it seems that in any case the foundations now give the company more room for expanding the service (even while bumping up the app size from under 600kb to 2MB).

That fact might matter less to users, but does point to some notable trends at the company itself and how it’s approaching tech in the future, and viewing feature parity between full and Lite versions of its flagship apps.