Month: June 2019

Aaron Rodgers is an athlete, an influencer and now, a venture capitalist.

The football star, Super Bowl champion and long-time quarterback for the Green Bay Packers has teamed up with ROTH Capital Partners’ Nate Raabe and Byron Roth to launch Rx3 Ventures. Today, the trio are announcing a $50 million debut fund focused on the consumer market.

The fund is supported by influencers in the sports and entertainment market, with a goal of giving them a stake in the companies for which they are hired to be spokespeople. Influencer marketing continues to gain traction; Rx3 wants to ensure authentic, equitable relationships between brands and public figures.

“As professional athletes, we’re constantly approached with investment opportunities,” Rodgers said in a statement. “With more and more access to deal flow, it’s hard for any athlete or high-profile individual to adequately evaluate each opportunity. We are in a unique position to help drive positive outcomes for companies, particularly consumer brands, but the relationship needs to be authentic. With Rx3, I saw the opportunity to create an investment platform that brings together a group of like-minded influential investors and their respective networks with the backing of institutional resources.”

Rx3 has invested in a number of startups already, including VICIS, known for its $950 Zero1 football helmet designed for adult players. The startup raised a $28.5 million Series B in November, with participation from Rodgers, as well as other pro footballers, including Roger Staubach, Jerry Rice, Russell Wilson and Doug Baldwin.

Rx3, which invests alongside consumer private equity and growth capital funds, has also backed Hims, CorePower Yoga, glasses retailer Privé Revaux and Hydrow, a maker of indoor rowing machines.

After announcing a year-long pilot of pop-up shops in the UK earlier this week to sell items from smaller marketplace merchants, Amazon has added another development to its brick-and-mortar efforts in the country. Starting today, the company is setting up physical kiosks, initially in train stations, to sell passers-by a rotating range of items at discounted prices.

The first of these will be in London, where Amazon is situating them in rail stations — Charing Cross, King’s Cross, Paddington, Liverpool Street and my local station London Bridge — and will start off by selling Boodles Mulberry Gin for £14.99 a bottle (a 40% discount on the normal price, Amazon notes).

The kiosks, Amazon says, are an extension of the company’s Treasure Truck concept, which sees a large vehicle doing the rounds across various towns — currently London, Manchester, Liverpool, Sheffield, Leeds, York, Birmingham, Coventry, Portsmouth, Southampton, Nottingham, Leicester, Windsor, Maidenhead, Reading and Slough (for US readers: the original site of The Office) — offering a rotating selection of items at discounted prices. These have been operating in the UK for a couple of years now.

With Treasure Truck in the UK, you sign up for the service (by texting “truck” to 87377) and Amazon texts you to let you know when the truck is coming your way. Users can pre-order and pay for items to collect them from the truck. It looks like the same format will apply to the kiosks, which will also become pick-up points. To incentivise more signups, Amazon said that new users will get an additional introductory discount of £5 per bottle.

Kiosks are a practical adaptation of the Treasure Truck concept for Amazon: as with other cities in Europe, the locations Amazon visits in the UK have narrow streets sometimes clogged with traffic and generally not designed for speedy arrivals of giant vehicles, and the population is more dense.

Also, situating kiosks in rail stations to catch people during their commutes means more may buy knowing they are on their way home or to an office so will not have to carry items around all day.

“Kiosks are a natural extension of the exciting shopping experience of Amazon’s Treasure Truck. Whether you’re on the way to work or heading home for the day, Amazon customers and passersby will have a fun and convenient way to shop for an amazing deal, get their hands on a trending product or take part in a fun event. Kiosks will help turn an ordinary day into something a bit more special,” said Suruchi Saxena Bansal, Country Leader, Amazon Treasure Truck, in a statement.

More generally, Amazon has been slowly increasing the different channels that it uses to connect with potential customers beyond its basic website and mobile app.

This is because “omnichannel” is the order of the day in commerce: in markets that are especially competitive and mature, we’ve seen a big shift among retailers to cater to a wider variety of audiences and sell to them in whichever channel where they are spending time and discovering things.

That’s included selling on social media (Instagram for one is making a big push with this), through email (see: Mailchimp’s efforts here), and of course doing things the old-fashioned way, by selling in person (something that efforts from the likes of Square and PayPal have also helped to grow).

That in-person experience is something that Amazon — born in the virtual world of cyberspace — has been doubling down on for years to reach a wider set of shoppers.

Its efforts have included bookstores near college campuses, cashier-free Amazon Go stores, the whopping acquisition of Whole Foods, and — as of earlier this week — setting up pop-up shops.

The latter are particularly ironic, given that the Amazon name is regularly invoked when people discuss how brick-and-mortar shops — and in the UK, “high street” shopping precincts — have died a death.

A year ago, there was a rumor that Amazon was negotiating in the UK to acquire a selection of large retail locations that were being vacated by the bankrupt hardware and DIY chain Homebase.

These sprawling locations, situated often in town outskirts among other large stores with huge parking lots, are a far cry from little kiosks in crowded train stations. And indeed, the Homebase deal, if it was every really on the cards, never came to pass.

But the report and Amazon’s wider track record are sure signs that the commerce is only going to get more physical, not less. It’s not a question of “if”, but rather of how and when.

LabCorp is the latest laboratory testing giant this week to confirm it’s affected by the same third-party data breach.

The Burlington, North Carolina-based medical giant said 7.7 million patients had their personal and financial data stolen by hackers, which hit the payment pages of the American Medical Collection Agency, a third-party vendor that processes payments for LabCorp and other companies.

The admission comes a day after Quest Diagnostics around 11.9 million patients had their data stolen.

In a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, LabCorp said the stolen data includes a patient’s name, date of birth, address, phone number, date of service, provider, and balance information.

“AMCA’s affected system also included credit card or bank account information that was provided by the consumer to AMCA,” said the filing. Some 200,000 patients will receive more detailed notices that their financial information was taken.

But LabCorp said no medical data or lab and diagnostic results data was taken.

Like the Quest breach, LabCorp’s data incident dated back to August 1, 2018 until March 30, 2019.

The total number of patients affected by the AMCA payments page breach stands at just shy of 20 million. Given the company provides payment and bill collection services to a broad range of businesses, we may see similar notices dropping in the near future.

China’s National Space Administration recorded a first today as it launched one of its Long March 11 rockets from a launch pad on board a ship in the Yellow Sea. This is the first time China has launched a space-bound rocket from a seaborne platform, and it carried on board a cargo of seven total rockets, including five designed for commercial use and two which will include experimental payloads for space-based research.

China joins the U.S. and Russia now as the three global powers with proven ability to launch rockets into space from sea, which is a competitive advantage when it comes to launch cots and potential incidental damage from misfires. China is the only country to have launched at sea from a platform and using launch technology that they solely and fully own and operate, since the previous Sea Launch platform used by the US and Russia was created in partnership with a number of nations, including Norway and the Ukraine, and ceased operating in 2014.

Today’s launch was also a joint effort with private industry, since the ship it was on was actually a civilian cargo vessel, and the launch rocket itself was sponsored by, and named after a relatively new Chinese luxury car brand called WEY.

Getsafe, the German insurance startup targeting millennials, has raised $17 million (€15m) in a Series A funding.

The round is led by Earlybird, with CommerzVentures and other existing investors also participating, while the capital will be used for European expansion. Notably, the company plans to launch in the U.K. by the end of the year.

Founded in May 2015 by Christian Wiens (CEO) and Marius Blaesing (CTO), Getsafe initially launched as a digital insurance broker but has since pivoted to a direct to digital consumer insurance offering of its own (its brokerage business was sold to Verivox).

The startup claims it is the market leader in the digital-first 20 to 35-year-old segment, with 20,000 customers, although competitors such as Wefox’s One may disagree.

Getsafe customers can take out renters insurance and liability insurance. The latter includes bike and drone coverage, with additional products to be added soon.

More broadly, Getsafe says it is “reinventing insurance”. The insurtech startup, based in Heidelberg, says its tech uses AI to help customers identify the insurance protection they might need. “With a few clicks, customers can learn about, buy, and manage insurance on their smartphone,” says the company. Claims can be done entirely digitally, too, via the Getsafe app and chatbot.

As part of the investment, Getsafe plans to grow its from the current 50 employees to more than 100. The recruitment drive will span customer care, software development and data science. The startup also plans to raise further funds over next twelve months.

The big social networks and video games have failed to prioritize user well-being over their own growth. As a result, society is losing the battle against bullying, predators, hate speech, misinformation and scammers. Typically when a whole class of tech companies have a dire problem they can’t cost-effectively solve themselves, a software-as-a-service emerges to fill the gap in web hosting, payment processing, etc. So along comes AntiToxin Technologies, a new Israeli startup that wants to help web giants fix their abuse troubles with its safety-as-a-service.

It all started on Minecraft. AntiToxin co-founder Ron Porat is cybersecurity expert who’d started popular ad blocker Shine. Yet right under his nose, one of his kids was being mercilessly bullied on the hit children’s game. If even those most internet-savvy parents were being surprised by online abuse, Porat realized the issue was bigger than could be addressed by victims trying to protect themselves. The platforms had to do more, research confirmed.

A recent Ofcom study found almost 80% of children had a potentially harmful online experience in the past year. Indeed, 23% said they’d been cyberbullied, and 28% of 12 to 15-year-olds said they’d received unwelcome friend or follow requests from strangers. A Ditch The Label study found of 12 to 20-year-olds who’d been bullied online, 42% were bullied on Instagram.

Unfortunately, the massive scale of the threat combined with a late start on policing by top apps makes progress tough without tremendous spending. Facebook tripled the headcount of its content moderation and security team, taking a noticeable hit to its profits, yet toxicity persists. Other mainstays like YouTube and Twitter have yet to make concrete commitments to safety spending or staffing, and the result is non-stop scandals of child exploitation and targeted harassment. Smaller companies like Snap or Fortnite-maker Epic Games may not have the money to develop sufficient safeguards in-house.

“The tech giants have proven time and time again we can’t rely on them. They’ve abdicated their responsibility. Parents need to realize this problem won’t be solved by these companies” says AntiToxin CEO Zohar Levkovitz, who previously sold his mobile ad company Amobee to Singtel for $321 million. “You need new players, new thinking, new technology. A company where ‘Safety’ is the product, not an after-thought. And that’s where we come-in.” The startup recently raised a multimillion-dollar seed round from Mangrove Capital Partners and is allegedly prepping for a double-digit millions Series A.

AntiToxin’s technology plugs into the backends of apps with social communities that either broadcast or message with each other and are thereby exposed to abuse. AntiToxin’s systems privately and securely crunch all the available signals regarding user behavior and policy violation reports, from text to videos to blocking. It then can flag a wide range of toxic actions and let the client decide whether to delete the activity, suspend the user responsible or how else to proceed based on their terms and local laws.

Through the use of artificial intelligence, including natural language processing, machine learning and computer vision, AntiToxin can identify the intent of behavior to determine if it’s malicious. For example, the company tells me it can distinguish between a married couple consensually exchanging nude photos on a messaging app versus an adult sending inappropriate imagery to a child. It also can determine if two teens are swearing at each other playfully as they compete in a video game or if one is verbally harassing the other. The company says that beats using static dictionary blacklists of forbidden words.

AntiToxin is under NDA, so it can’t reveal its client list, but claims recent media attention and looming regulation regarding online abuse has ramped up inbound interest. Eventually the company hopes to build better predictive software to identify users who’ve shown signs of increasingly worrisome behavior so their activity can be more closely moderated before they lash out. And it’s trying to build a “safety graph” that will help it identify bad actors across services so they can be broadly deplatformed similar to the way Facebook uses data on Instagram abuse to police connected WhatsApp accounts.

“We’re approaching this very human problem like a cybersecurity company, that is, everything is a Zero-Day for us” says Levkowitz, discussing how AntiToxin indexes new patterns of abuse it can then search for across its clients. “We’ve got intelligence unit alums, PhDs and data scientists creating anti-toxicity detection algorithms that the world is yearning for.” AntiToxin is already having an impact. TechCrunch commissioned it to investigate a tip about child sexual imagery on Microsoft’s Bing search engine. We discovered Bing was actually recommending child abuse image results to people who’d conducted innocent searches, leading Bing to make changes to clean up its act.

AntiToxin identified publicly listed WhatsApp Groups where child sexual abuse imagery was exchanged

One major threat to AntiToxin’s business is what’s often seen as boosting online safety: end-to-end encryption. AntiToxin claims that when companies like Facebook expand encryption, they’re purposefully hiding problematic content from themselves so they don’t have to police it.

Facebook claims it still can use metadata about connections on its already encrypted WhatApp network to suspend those who violate its policy. But AntiToxin provided research to TechCrunch for an investigation that found child sexual abuse imagery sharing groups were openly accessible and discoverable on WhatsApp — in part because encryption made them hard to hunt down for WhatsApp’s automated systems.

AntiToxin believes abuse would proliferate if encryption becomes a wider trend, and it claims the harm that it  causes outweighs fears about companies or governments surveiling unencrypted transmissions. It’s a tough call. Political dissidents, whistleblowers and perhaps the whole concept of civil liberty rely on encryption. But parents may see sex offenders and bullies as a more dire concern that’s reinforced by platforms having no idea what people are saying inside chat threads.

What seems clear is that the status quo has got to go. Shaming, exclusion, sexism, grooming, impersonation and threats of violence have started to feel commonplace. A culture of cruelty breeds more cruelty. Tech’s success stories are being marred by horror stories from their users. Paying to pick up new weapons in the fight against toxicity seems like a reasonable investment to demand.

Like clockwork, Google has filed a legal appeal against the €1.49 billion ($1.7BN) antitrust penalty the European Commission slapped on its search ad brokering business three months ago.

The Telegraph reported late yesterday that the appeal had been lodged in the General Court of the European Union in Brussels.

A Google spokesperson confirmed the appeal has been filed but declined to comment further.

Reached for comment, a Commission spokesperson told us: “The Commission will defend its decision in Court.”

The AdSense antitrust decision is the third fine for Google under the Commission’s current antitrust chief, Margrethe Vestager — who also issued a $5BN penalty for anti-competitive behaviors attached to Android last summer; following a $2.7BN fine for Google Shopping antitrust violations, in mid 2017.

Google is appealing both earlier penalties but has also made changes to how it operates Google Shopping and Android in Europe in the meanwhile, to avoid the risk of further punitive penalties.

In the case of AdSense, the Commission found that between 2006 and 2016 Google included restrictive clauses in its contracts with major sites that use its ad platform which Vestager said could only be seen as intending to keep rivals out of the market.

Restrictions had included exclusivity provisions and premium ad placement requirements that gave Google’s ads priority and plumb positioning on “the most visible and most profitable parts of the page”. Another illegal clause put controls on how partner websites could display rival search ads.

The restrictions were only removed by Google when the Commission issued its formal statement of objections in 2016 — signalling the start of serious scrutiny.

As well as going on to fine Google €1.49BN for AdSense antitrust breaches, the Commission’s enforcement decision requires that Google does not include any other restriction “with an equivalent effect” in its contracts, as well as stipulating that it must not reinstate the earlier abusive clauses.

A startup that is attempting to significantly improve the way how Indians rent or buy an apartment just raised a substantially big amount to further pursue its mission. Bangalore-based real estate property operator NoBroker said today it has raised $51 million in a new round of funding.

The Series C financing round for the five-year-old startup was led by General Atlantic. Existing investors SAIF Partners and BEENEXT also participated in the round. NoBroker has raised about $71 million in capital to date, it said in a statement. 

NoBroker, which operates in Bengaluru, Chennai, Gurgaon, Mumbai and Pune, has quickly emerged as one of the largest players in the real estate business. It operates over 2.5 million properties on its website and has already served more than 6 million users to date — up from 1.5 million customers two years ago. The startup helps Indians looking for an apartment avoid the brokers  — hence the name NoBroker — and connects them directly to property owners.

Real estate brokers in India, as is true in other markets, help people find properties. But they can charge up to 10 months worth of rent (leasing) — or a percent of the apartment’s worth if someone is buying the property — in urban cities as their commission.

Amit Kumar, CEO and cofounder of NoBroker, told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup will use the fresh capital to expand its operations in the nation. “This current funding round will support us in our plans to expand our operations. Our objective is to accelerate customer and deal-closure growth and continue to deliver value to customers across the country. We will also invest in our home store and financial services products,” he said. 

Kumar said the startup, which makes money in two ways, is increasingly reaching profitability. It first lets non-paying users only get in touch with nine property owners. Those who wish to contact more property owners have to pay a fee. Second, property owners can opt to pay NoBroker to have its representatives deal with prospective buyers. (Which ironically makes it act like a broker.)

As noble as NoBroker’s mission sounds, its path to expansion is filled with challenges. The startup is competing with a number of players including heavily backed NestAway, which counts Goldman Sachs and Tiger Global among its investors. The startup, which operates in eight cities, has raised more than $100 million to date. Budget hotel startup Oyo, which now counts Airbnb as an investor, has also entered this space with Oyo Living. India’s real estate industry is estimated to grow to $1 trillion in worth by 2030.

Besides, there are some other local challenges. For one, brokers are unsurprisingly not happy with startups such as NoBroker. They continue to attack and harass NoBroker employees. So much so that the startup had to delist its address from Google Maps.

“We have been extremely impressed by the strength of the NoBroker team and their relentless focus on using technology to create an improved user experience in the large real estate market in India. We look forward to supporting them in their journey of making real estate transactions easier and convenient,” said Sharad Bhojnagarwala, VP of General Atlantic, in a statement.

Microsoft and Oracle announced a new alliance today that will see the two companies directly connect their clouds over a direct network connection so that their users can then move workloads and data seamlessly between the two. This alliance goes a bit beyond just basic direct connectivity and also includes identity interoperability.

This kind of alliance is relatively unusual between what are essentially competing clouds, but while Oracle wants to be seen as a major player in this space, it also realizes that it isn’t likely to get to the size of an AWS, Azure or Google Cloud anytime soon. For Oracle, this alliance means that its users can run services like the Oracle E-Business Suite and Oracle JD Edwards on Azure while still using an Oracle database in the Oracle cloud, for example. With that, Microsoft still gets to run the workloads and Oracle gets to do what it does best (though Azure users will also continue be able to run their Oracle databases in the Azure cloud, too).

“The Oracle Cloud offers a complete suite of integrated applications for sales, service, marketing, human resources, finance, supply chain and manufacturing, plus highly automated and secure Generation 2 infrastructure featuring the Oracle Autonomous Database,” said Don Johnson, executive vice president, Oracle Cloud Infrastructure (OCI), in today’s announcement. “Oracle and Microsoft have served enterprise customer needs for decades. With this alliance, our joint customers can migrate their entire set of existing applications to the cloud without having to re-architect anything, preserving the large investments they have already made.”

For now, the direct interconnect between the two clouds is limited to Azure US East and Oracle’s Ashburn data center. The two companies plan to expand this alliance to other regions in the future, though they remain mum on the details. It’ll support applications like JD Edwards EnterpriseOne, E-Business Suite, PeopleSoft, Oracle Retail and Hyperion on Azure, in combination with Oracle databases like RAC, Exadata and the Oracle Autonomous Database running in the Oracle Cloud.

“As the cloud of choice for the enterprise, with over 95% of the Fortune 500 using Azure, we have always been first and foremost focused on helping our customers thrive on their digital transformation journeys,” said Scott Guthrie, executive vice president of Microsoft’s Cloud and AI division. “With Oracle’s enterprise expertise, this alliance is a natural choice for us as we help our joint customers accelerate the migration of enterprise applications and databases to the public cloud.”

Today’s announcement also fits within a wider trend at Microsoft, which has recently started building a number of alliances with other large enterprise players, including its open data alliance with SAP and Adobe, as well as a somewhat unorthodox gaming partnership with Sony.

Grow Mobility, the entity that consists of electric scooter startup Grin, and bike and scooter-share startup Yellow, has merged with payments startup Flinto.

Flinto enables people to make peer-to-peer payments, add minutes and text messages to your phone, and pay bills and merchants. Flinto works for those with or without bank accounts. If someone doesn’t have a bank account, they can deposit cash at local shops and restaurants.

“It started to make a lot of sense to bring Flinto as part of the team to develop the wallet because for Latin America, the wallet is not an add-on,” Grin co-founder Jonathan Lewy told TechCrunch. “It’s a need if you want to tap into a big market of underbanked or non-banked. The only way to bring them on the platform is through a wallet. For us, the wallet is something that we see as the future of the company.”

As part of a merger earlier this year between Grin and Yellow, the new entity rebranded as Grow Mobility. Grow Mobility operates more than 135,000 micromobility vehicles across six countries and plans to more than double its fleet in the next few months across Latin America. Now, Flinto is part of the pack.

That means riders of Grow Mobility’s products will be able to make payments through Flinto. Down the road, the plan is to expand use cases for Flinto within Grow and then phase out the Flinto brand.