Year: 2018

The transformations that companies like Tesla, Uber and Lyft bring to the auto industry are changing more than just the ways car companies think about drivetrains and ownership, and its opening doors for new ways of thinking about the entire mobility industry.

That’s the word from some of Israel’s top investors from the stage at our TechCrunch Tel Aviv event.

Every aspect of the auto industry is being reshaped by technological innovation and it’s opening the traditionally closed supply chains that car makers have relied on for at least a century creating more opportunities for startup vendors in areas like sensors, software, services, and yes, even electrification.

For Michael Granoff, the founder of Maniv Mobility, Chemi Peres, the founder of PItango, and Yahal Zilka, the co-founder of Magma Venture Partners, there are at least four areas of opportunity for startups (especially startups hailing from Israel’s innovation nation) to penetrate the trillion dollar mobility market.

Artificial intelligence, new business models, electrification, and enabling sensor technologies are all areas where Israeli entrepreneurs have launched businesses, and they’re all technologies in high demand from established automakers and the upstarts that would challenge them.

“It’s not just automotive, but what Israel can bring to that,” says Zilka. “The big thing in automotive was the introduction of semiconductors. Over the next 15 to 20 years it’s going to be artificial intelligence.”

How those technologies come to market for mobility used to depend on an established supply chain, where tier 2 technology vendors would sell to tier 1 suppliers and then be integrated into the cars by the big brand original equipment manufacturers like Ford, GM, BMW, Daimler, Toyota, and the like.

Tesla’s entrance into the market and the competitive threats that Uber, Lyft, Gett and others pose to the entire automotive business model have pushed these companies to shake things up, making investments in technology for the automotive industry far more attractive.

“Only when your business is effected by the digital wave of internet and connectivity, only then do you start moving,” says Peres.

For Israel, that means a window has opened for enabling technologies like sensors, artificial intelligence, data processing, and new business models.

These new companies with names like Autofleet, otonomo, Innoviz Technologies, Oryx Vision, and Via are already establishing themselves as competitors or suppliers helping to transform the existing order. 

For Peres and the other investors, automakers should expect to see even more radical changes ahead as technologies push further transformations to industrial infrastructure, the urban environment and consumer demand.

“The old generation was that you create a production facility… [and] you create masses of products, but it’s going to be completely disrupted,” says Peres. “You’re going to have much less cars and cars are going to be much more sophisticated in their services.”

Cars, Peres says, are moving to the elevator pitch — where vehicles on streets are used like elevators in buildings. “It will eliminate ownership, reduce operational costs, reduce energy costs, and will be able to get a great service and save the over 1 million people that are killed every year and the 50 million people that are injured,” Peres says.

Those changes will impact more than just the auto industry. Manufacturing will be disrupted by additive manufacturing technologies, and, eventually, advancements in nanotechnology that will allow for self-assembling machines.

Eventually, these changes are going to force more action from regulators as they grapple with how to address the increasing demand that will come with cost depreciation, according to Granoff. 

“There’s going to be a pricing mechanism that is going to be required to modulate the use of roadways,” he says. 

For Peres, the future may not be the use of roadways at all. “It doesn’t need to be cars on roads. It can be flying robots,” says the Pitango co-founder.

No matter what the ultimate solution is, given the Israeli entrepreneurial ecosystem, it’s a good bet that at some level there’ll be Israeli technology behind the wheel of each innovation.

Back in 2015, Google launched an initiative to bring free WiFi to India’s railway stations and today the U.S. tech giant announced that the program has passed its target of reaching 400 stations, attracting a base of eight million users in the process.

The milestone was hit today when Dibrugarh station in northeastern state Assam went online.

Google gave some insight into the scale of the program’s reach when it revealed that over eight million people use the railway-based WiFi each month. On average, the firm said, users consume 350MB in data per session with half going online via the WiFi program at least twice per day.

In another sign of scale, Google began to monetize the initiative earlier this year by offering high-speed connections for a price. The standard option includes ads to develop revenue for Google and its partners, which include Indian Railways and RailTel.

Reaching million users and over 400 stations is hugely impressive but Google said that its journey “remains unfinished.” Beyond connecting stations, the firm wants to add free WiFi to other connection points across India.

“India has the second largest population of internet users in the world, but there are still almost a billion Indians who aren’t online. There are millions of other life-changing journeys that still haven’t been taken. We realize that not everyone in India lives or works near a train station,” Caesar Sengupta, VP of Google’s Next Billion team, wrote in a blog post.

The program is also taking roots overseas. Google has already expanded it to Indonesia and Mexico and Sengupta said that it will make its way to “even more countries soon.”

Google isn’t the only tech giant pioneering a free Wi-Fi model. Facebook’s successor to Internet.org — the program that was banned in India for violating net neutrality regulations — launched in India last year. The company hasn’t said much about it, but it isn’t likely to have anything like the same scale as Google’s.

Free Wi-Fi isn’t the only India-specific strategy from Google. The U.S. firm has launched a series of local services in India, including data-friendly versions of its top apps, a mobile payment network called Tez, a food delivery service and — most recently — a social network for local communities.

CloudNC, the U.K. startup and Entrepreneur First alumni that is developing AI software to automate part of the manufacturing process, has quietly raised £9 million in Series A funding, TechCrunch has learned.

According to sources — and since confirmed by the company — Atomico, the European VC firm founded by Skype’s Niklas Zennström, has led the round. A number of existing investors, including Episode 1 and Entrepreneur First, also participated. We first heard a term sheet had been put on the table as far back as March, and last week the investment finally closed.

With the broader aim of using AI to dramatically reduce the time and costs associated with manufacturing, CloudNC is developing software and a cloud computing service that hopes to automate the programming of CNC milling machines.

These machines work by carving blocks of solid metal into useful shapes, where a useful shape could be anything from a Macbook body, to bits of a car, to jet engine turbine blades. Unlike 3D printing, this happens in a ‘subtractive’ way; metal is cut out until what is left is the resulting component.

The problem is that to instruct a CNC machine to turn a 3D design into a finished part requires it to be fed pre-programmed sequences of machine control commands, which currently is a highly skilled and manual process. You have to instruct the machine not just precisely where and how to cut, but also which of its hundreds of tools to use. Programming a CNC machine can also be time-consuming, taking up to 100 hours for more complicated parts.

Related to this manual labour, there’s a second problem CloudNC thinks it can solve, which is the speed of manufacturing itself. That’s because, the startup claims, a human can’t possibly calculate the most efficient way to cut out a block of metal for each bespoke part being manufactured, even though it is currently extremely well-educated guess-work. However, in theory, AI combined with ‘super computing’ in the cloud, can. The result: halving the time needed to manufacture parts and therefore halving the costs (minus the raw material costs, of course).

“We’re applying breakthrough AI methods to control these machines automatically, which will revolutionise how the things around us are made,” CloudNC co-founder and CEO told me after I called him yesterday to confirm the startup’s Series A. “Our mission is to make milling machines one click devices that can produce a part easily, efficiently and with minimal human intervention”.

Meanwhile, a person familiar with Atomico’s investment tells me it plays into the VC firm’s strategy around “industry 4.0,” and that we can expect further investments in the space.

Specifically related to CloudNC, the thinking is that we are heading towards a future where there will be less emphasis on mass production and a move towards just-in-time manufacturing, where certain kinds of products are produced closer to where they are sold and can benefit from near zero inventory. Consumer trends such as product personalization and an appetite for innovative design-led products, enabled by new technology, business models and startups, are helping to drive this.

If CloudNC can deliver on its promise of halving the cost of CNC machine-based manufacturing, it stands to make a major contribution to — and benefit from — that future.

Marshmallow, a new ‘insurtech’ startup in the U.K. building a product for immigrants/expats who are poorly served by the car insurance market, has picked up $1.2 million in seed funding. Backing the company, which is set to launch later this year, is Passion Capital, and Investec Bank.

Founded in March 2017 by identical twins Oliver and Alexander Kent-Braham, and David Goate — all three of whom previously worked at digital identity company Yoti — Marshmallow is developing insurance products that aim to use better data and technology to provide more fairly priced insurance cover to non-U.K. nationals. To that end, the startup is starting out with car insurance for foreign-born drivers.

“Car insurance typically requires an insurer to understand a person’s driving ability, driving history and current lifestyle before they can offer them an accurate price,” explains Marshmallow’s Oliver Kent-Braham.

“Unfortunately, a lot of insurers don’t attempt to understand foreign drivers living in the U.K., instead they just overcharge them. U.K.-based, foreign drivers can expect to be quoted prices that are 51 percent higher than the market average”.

To fix that, the Marshmallow team — which also includes Tim Holliday, who was previously the Chief Underwriting Officer and MD of Personal Lines at Zurich — has built an underwriting system that aggregates global data rather than U.K.-only data.

“We combine this with a proprietary algorithm that eliminates underwriting bias before computing a more accurate price for foreign drivers living in the U.K.,” says Kent-Braham.

The Marshmallow founder says typical customers are people who have moved to the U.K. to build a life here. The company’s research suggests that after one or two years of living in the U.K., people are ready to settle down and that this often means buying a car and inevitably getting insurance.

“Our customers are ambitious, entrepreneurial, educated people who are striving to build a better life in the U.K. Unfortunately, with the current political climate these individuals don’t always feel welcome in the U.K. and we don’t want financial services to further discourage them to settle here,” he says.

Meanwhile, competitors are cited as large incumbent insurers who still use legacy systems and struggle to use U.K. data, let alone global data. In other words — similar to other fintech narratives — this is being pitched as a battle against antiquated companies and old technology.

“We’ve built everything from the ground up which enables us to access global data, have accurate pricing and a user experience that is transparent and convenient,’ adds Kent-Braham.

Here’s a unique approach to Western companies doing business in China. Today, Evernote — the U.S. note-making service — span out its China-based unit into an independent entity with “full autonomy” over its business and services.

Evernote introduced its Yinxiang Biji China-based service in 2012, but now it is transitioning to a minority shareholder with the Chinese management team taking day-to-day control. As part of its move to independence, Yinxiang Biji has raised an undisclosed Series A round from the Sequoia CBC Cross-border Digital Industry Fund.

The terms are not disclosed, but Raymond Tang, CEO of Yinxiang Biji, said ownership of the business is split roughly equally between Evernote, the Chinese investors and the startup’s management team — while Yinxiang Biji itself has raised “several hundred million RMB.” (For comparison, 100 million RMB is roughly $15 million.)

Evernote and Yinxiang Biji have inked a two-year deal that will see them cross-license IP, and Tang and Evernote CMO Andrew Malcolm told TechCrunch in an interview that the duo will continue to work closely. The IP deal could also be extended, according to Malcolm, who added that the spin-out has been a move that he and Tang have discussed since they both joined Evernote in 2015.

Yinxiang Biji claims to have more than 20 million registered users who have created over one billion notes. Tang said that note creation in China per user is 50 percent higher than Evernote’s other customer base, while the business has grown at a 60-percent rate annually.

More broadly, Malcolm said the China entity accounts for some 10 percent of Evernote’s global revenue but he acknowledged that, despite adopting a local strategy since it launched, Yinxiang Biji will have the freedom to push its business harder as an independent entity. That chiefly includes building out features that apply more directly in China, such as social integrations and more.

“Even without having done some of the basics that [Chinese] users would expect, we’ve found product-market fit. How much more impactful could we be if we allowed the Chinese market team to think about their brand, technology and innovation?” he said.

The company has arguably been one of the most successful U.S. tech companies to venture into China — Linkedin, which is mired in some controversy, might be another. Yet still a change is needed since the existing approach “doesn’t satisfy what we have learned about how Chinese users want to use Evernote versus those in the rest of the world,” Malcolm summarized.

That sentiment was echoed by Eric Xu, partner of the Sequoia fund.

“I am convinced that Yinxiang Biji will further unleash its potential and pick up development after the spin-off, as technical and decision-making autonomy is gained and fully localized operations are on the way. Moreover, its business model is a frame of reference for future cross-border Internet partnerships,” Xu said in a supplied statement.

Beyond impact on the service, there is a major business reason, too. The move frees Yinxiang Biji up for a potential listing, which Malcolm and Tang both acknowledged is part of the plan since Chinese financial regulations are strict, including clauses such as two years of profitability. Part of that planned approach includes the new management structure, which makes Yinxiang Biji majority-Chinese owned thus satisfying another regulatory requirement.

“We are very much aware of how far ahead you need to be thinking” in order to go public in China, Malcolm said. “It’s top of our minds when we speak.”

Tang, meanwhile, suggested that the company might look to tap exchanges in Shanghai or Shenzhen, but there’s no immediate timeframe for that at this point. Both executives pointed out that the Chinese market requires a unique approach and, in this case for certain, Evernote is adopting one.

Evernote, once valued at over $1 billion, has been in a period of transition over the last few years after the exit of co-founder and CEO Phil Libin in the summer of 2015. A slew of over executives followed Libin, a ‘changing of the guard’ as perhaps might be expected when a founding member departs. Since then, the company has quietly solidified its business in the years since then under the helm of CEO Chris O’Neill, who previously spent a decade with Google.

Under that context, the Chinese move makes plenty of sense since it happened under the previous Evernote management regime, but it also raises questions about Evernote’s own immediate future, and a potential IPO. The company isn’t saying anything on that now, but it would be quite something if the business unit it set up in China went public before the mothership.

A new bit of research from David Shear at security firm Flashpoint found that there are hundreds if not thousands of open Trello boards containing passwords, login credentials, and other potentially sensitive stuff including employee on-boarding documents. He and Brian Krebs reported the boards to Trello although some folks have already been notified by well-meaning hackers who wrote “Change your password” on some of these public boards.

“One particularly jarring misstep came from someone working for Seceon, a Westford, Mass. cybersecurity firm that touts the ability to detect and stop data breaches in real time,” wrote Krebs. “But until a few weeks ago the Trello page for Seceon featured multiple usernames and passwords, including credentials to log in to the company’s WordPress blog and iPage domain hosting.”

Another Trello board made at Red Hat in 2017 offered passwords to a pair of online test servers.

Trello worked with the pair to take down the public boards they found and is working with Google to remove the cached sites.

“We have put many safeguards in place to make sure that public boards are being created intentionally and have clear language around each privacy setting, as well as persistent visibility settings at the top of each board,” said a Trello spokesperson.

Missteps like these are sadly common. Another rich trove of user data, Github, has been used to find private passwords for years. Anecdotally, a project I was working on suffered a breach when the CTO put a Bitcoin private key into some public Github code. Yeah. Exactly.

So, again, keep your Trello boards private, don’t paste passwords willy-nilly, and maintain at least a basic level of operational security by not pasting passwords into any site that could make it public. It’s hard but definitely worth the effort.

The images that appear on social media – happy people eating, cultural happenings, and smiling dogs – can actually predict the likelihood that a neighborhood is “healthy” as well as its level of gentrification.

From the report:

So says a groundbreaking study published in Frontiers in Physics, in which researchers used social media images of cultural events in London and New York City to create a model that can predict neighborhoods where residents enjoy a high level of wellbeing — and even anticipate gentrification by 5 years. With more than half of the world’s population living in cities, the model could help policymakers ensure human wellbeing in dense urban settings.

The idea is based on the concept of “cultural capital” – the more there is, the better the neighborhood becomes. For example, if there are many pictures of fun events in a certain spot you can expect a higher level of well-being in that area’s denizens. The research also suggests that investing in arts and culture will actively improve a neighborhood.

“Culture has many benefits to an individual: it opens our minds to new emotional experiences and enriches our lives,” said Dr. Daniele Quercia. “We’ve known for decades that this ‘cultural capital’ plays a huge role in a person’s success. Our new model shows the same correlation for neighborhoods and cities, with those neighborhoods experiencing the greatest growth having high cultural capital. So, for every city or school district debating whether to invest in arts programs or technology centers, the answer should be a resounding ‘Yes!'”

The Cambridge-based team looked at “millions of Flickr images” taken at cultural events in New York and London and overlaid them on maps of these cities. The findings, as we can imagine, were obvious.

“We were able to see that the presence of culture is directly tied to the growth of certain neighborhoods, rising home values and median income. Our model can even predict gentrification within five years,” said Quercia. “This could help city planners and councils think through interventions to prevent people from being displaced as a result of gentrification.”

The team expects to be able to assess the health of citizens using the same method, overlaying pictures of food on maps in order to find food deserts and spots where cafes and croissants are on the rise. Just imagine: all those Instagrammed photos of your favorite sandwiches will some day help researchers build happier cities.

Y Combinator alum Meesho, one of several “social selling” startups gaining speed in India, will add more features to its e-commerce platform after closing a $11.5 million Series B led by Sequoia India. Existing investors SAIF Partners, Y Combinator and Venture Highway also returned for the round, which brings the Bangalore-based startup’s total funding so far to $15 million. Its last round of funding, a $3.4 million Series A, was announced last October.

Like social selling competitors including GlowRoad and Zepo, Meesho’s model combines dropshipping from its wholesale partners with a comprehensive suite of e-commerce tools and services. This reduces overhead while making it easy for sellers, who Meesho says includes many housewives, students and retirees, to set up an online business through WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media.

Meesho’s tools include an online platform that allows sellers to manage purchases and process payments, as well as a network of wholesale suppliers (its main categories are currently fashion and lifestyle items) and logistics providers. In other words, it offers almost everything its vendors need to start selling online. This leaves vendors responsible for customer acquisition, picking what items they want to include in their online shops and marketing them.

This reselling model appeals to small stores, as well as individuals, who want to make more money but don’t want the expense of setting up an e-commerce business from scratch and carrying inventory. Meesho’s rivals include e-commerce startups like GlowRoad, Shopmatic and Zepo, which have also recently raised large funding rounds. All of these companies attract sellers by offering a significant amount of help with order management, payment processing, fulfillment and logistics.

In order to differentiate, chief executive officer Vidit Aatrey, who co-founded Meesho in 2015 with Sanjeev Barnwal, its chief technology officer, tells TechCrunch it focuses on product quality, pricing and personalization to help resellers improve their sales and customer service. Meesho claims that more than 800,000 resellers have used its platform and that a “typical” reseller earns between 20,000 to 25,000 rupees per month (about $298 to $373).

In a press statement about the funding, Sequoia India managing director Mohit Bhatnagar said “Social commerce is the future of e-commerce in India. People buy from people they trust, and that’s what Meesho enables.  Entrepreneurs, many of them women, use the Meesho platform to recommend, customize and sell to their family and friends. Social selling is a huge trend and Sequoia India is excited to partner with Meesho, which is the early leader in this space.”

Aatrey says Meesho’s Series B capital will be used to hire more people for its tech and product teams in order to build a suite of new customer acquisition and selling tools. The startup also plans to add more personalization options for its resellers and product categories.

Y Combinator alum Meesho, one of several “social selling” startups gaining speed in India, will add more features to its e-commerce platform after closing a $11.5 million Series B led by Sequoia India. Existing investors SAIF Partners, Y Combinator and Venture Highway also returned for the round, which brings the Bangalore-based startup’s total funding so far to $15 million. Its last round of funding, a $3.4 million Series A, was announced last October.

Like social selling competitors including GlowRoad and Zepo, Meesho’s model combines dropshipping from its wholesale partners with a comprehensive suite of e-commerce tools and services. This reduces overhead while making it easy for sellers, who Meesho says includes many housewives, students and retirees, to set up an online business through WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media.

Meesho’s tools include an online platform that allows sellers to manage purchases and process payments, as well as a network of wholesale suppliers (its main categories are currently fashion and lifestyle items) and logistics providers. In other words, it offers almost everything its vendors need to start selling online. This leaves vendors responsible for customer acquisition, picking what items they want to include in their online shops and marketing them.

This reselling model appeals to small stores, as well as individuals, who want to make more money but don’t want the expense of setting up an e-commerce business from scratch and carrying inventory. Meesho’s rivals include e-commerce startups like GlowRoad, Shopmatic and Zepo, which have also recently raised large funding rounds. All of these companies attract sellers by offering a significant amount of help with order management, payment processing, fulfillment and logistics.

In order to differentiate, chief executive officer Vidit Aatrey, who co-founded Meesho in 2015 with Sanjeev Barnwal, its chief technology officer, tells TechCrunch it focuses on product quality, pricing and personalization to help resellers improve their sales and customer service. Meesho claims that more than 800,000 resellers have used its platform and that a “typical” reseller earns between 20,000 to 25,000 rupees per month (about $298 to $373).

In a press statement about the funding, Sequoia India managing director Mohit Bhatnagar said “Social commerce is the future of e-commerce in India. People buy from people they trust, and that’s what Meesho enables.  Entrepreneurs, many of them women, use the Meesho platform to recommend, customize and sell to their family and friends. Social selling is a huge trend and Sequoia India is excited to partner with Meesho, which is the early leader in this space.”

Aatrey says Meesho’s Series B capital will be used to hire more people for its tech and product teams in order to build a suite of new customer acquisition and selling tools. The startup also plans to add more personalization options for its resellers and product categories.

Fintech startup Revolut likes to announce new things all the time. Even though nothing is going live today, it’s interesting to see where the startup is heading. The company is working on a trading platform for traditional shares without any commission.

You’ll find stock from public companies from the U.K. and the U.S., as well as various ETFs and options. In other words, Revolut is going to become the Robinhood of Europe.

While American customers have been using Robinhood for years, the rest of the world has been lagging behind when it comes to stock trading.

You still have to open an account on a painfully slow website and pay a few euros for every transaction. Some companies even ask you to send a letter to create an account. And if you want to buy stock through your existing bank account, it usually costs even more.

Revolut promises that you won’t pay any commission when you buy or sell shares. The company plans to make money on margin trading, securities lending and interest on cash. Unfortunately, Revolut didn’t say when the feature would launch.

Premium subscribers will be able to test the feature first. Eventually, you’ll also get additional perks if you’re a premium subscriber. Trading will be available to all Revolut users in Europe and future markets. The company plans to launch in the U.S., Canada, Singapore, Hong Kong, Australia and New Zealand in the coming months.

Revolut’s premium subscription is becoming a sort of Amazon Prime for financial products. You pay £6.99/€7.99 per month and you get unlimited foreign exchange transactions, travel insurance, access to new features and more.

It’s clear that Revolut plans on making predictable revenue on this premium subscription. And maybe the trading platform will make more people subscribe to Revolut Premium.

Additionally, Revolut now officially has 2 million users. It’s funny to see that Revolut is announcing this new milestone just days after N26 announced a million users. Interestingly, Revolut has 900,000 users in the U.K., where N26 has yet to launch.