Month: September 2020

There’s a lot of virtual ground for one person to cover — and real opportunities to uncover — during the two days of TC Sessions: Mobility 2020 (Oct. 6-7). Take advantage of our group discounts, bring the whole team and multiply your results and your ROI.

Buy four or more passes, and you’ll trim $25 off the price of each pass — but only if you buy them before the deadline: October 5 at 11:59 p.m. (PDT).

With all hands on deck, you can attend interviews, breakout sessions and panel discussions — and interact with top industry leaders — to get a handle on emerging trends. Here’s just one prime example and be sure to check out the Mobility 2020 agenda for the full scoop.

Building an AV Startup: Ike co-founder and chief engineer Nancy Sun will share her experiences in the world of automation and robotics, a ride that has taken her from Apple to Otto and Uber before she set off to start a self-driving truck company. Sun will discuss what the future holds for trucking and the challenges and the secrets behind building a successful mobility startup.

“Attending TC Sessions: Mobility helps us keep an eye on what’s coming around the corner. It uncovers crucial trends so we can identify what we should be thinking about before anyone else.” — Jeff Johnson, vice president of enterprise sales and solutions at FlashParking.

Other team members can explore and connect with more than 40 early-stage mobility startups exhibiting in the expo — who knows what opportunities they’ll find? With thousands of attendees from around the world, the networking potential will be off the hook. Good news: we don’t have an app for that — we have a full-blown AI-powered platform: CrunchMatch.

It’s the perfect tool for networking at a virtual conference. When you register, simply answer a few quick questions, and CrunchMatch gets to work connecting you with the people who can help grow your business. The rest is up to you — schedule 1:1 video calls and begin building the relationships that can change the course of your business.

“TC Sessions: Mobility isn’t just an educational opportunity, it’s a real networking opportunity. Everyone was passionate and open to creating pilot programs or other partnerships. That was the most exciting part. And now — thanks to a conference connection — we’re talking with Goodyear’s Innovation Lab.” — Karin Maake, senior director of communications at FlashParking.

So much vital information and incredible opportunity awaits at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020. Don’t go it alone. Grab a group discount, take your whole team and do whatever it takes to drive your business forward.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at TC Sessions: Mobility 2020? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Marco Financial, a new Miami-based startup, is looking to take a piece of the roughly $350 billion trade finance market for Latin American exporters with its novel factoring services business. 

Small and medium sized businesses in Latin America can have trouble getting the financing they need to launch export operations to the U.S. and Marco said it aims to bridge that gap with new risk modeling and management tools that can make better decisions on who should receive loans.

“For smaller businesses in Latin America, accessing trade finance to export their goods is a major concern and a top reason why many don’t succeed,” said Javier Urrutia, Director of Foreign Investments at PROCOLOMBIA, an organization that promotes foreign investment and non-traditional exports in Colombia, in a statement from the company. “In Colombia alone, a 1% increase in exporter productivity in our textile industry would result in 500,000 new jobs for the country.”

The company is backed by a small seed round from Struck Capital and Antler and over $20 million in a credit facility underwritten by Arcadia Funds.  

“As a former owner of a small business in Latin America, I saw firsthand how difficult it is for SMEs in this region to access trade financing that will let them export their goods while retaining enough capital to keep their business running,” said Peter D. Spradling, COO and co-founder of Marco, in a statement. “Access to trade finance is one of the greatest hurdles in business operations and the traditional system dominated by banks is simply not working anymore, disproportionately hurting SMEs and further restricting economic mobility and job creation in emerging markets. Equity funding and a material credit facility let us serve this underserved market in Latin America and help build a healthier, more equitable trade ecosystem reflective of an increasingly borderless global economy.”

Spradling met his co-founder Jacob Shoihet through the Antler accelerator a Singapore and New York-based early stage investment and advisory services program that connects entrepreneurs and tech operators to launch new businesses. 

Shoihet, a classically trained musician who fell in with the startup scene in New York through work at Yelp was eager to launch his own company and connected with Spradling over shared interests in intermittent fasting and sports.

Small and medium businesses have hard time receiving loans from traditional lenders thanks to tighter regulations and capital controls dating back to the 2008 financial crisis, according to Marco’s founders. And the long periods that companies have to wait between when goods are shipped and orders are payed can put undue pressure on business operations. Factoring solves the gap by lending to merchants based on their receivables.

Marco said that it can reduce the length of the loan origination process from over two months to one week and provide funding to approved exporters within 24 hours.

The company is initially focused on Mexico, Uruguay, Chile, Colombia and Peru, and chose those markets because Spradling’s previous experience as an importer and exporter across the region.

“We look for companies that not only target massive, sleepy industries but also for ones that are led by management teams with fresh perspectives and asymmetric information that position them to upend incumbents,” said Yida Gao, partner at Struck Capital, in a statement. “In short order, Marco has assembled a world-class team to tackle the multi trillion-dollar trade finance market in a post-Covid time when SMEs around the world need, more than ever, reliable capital to fund operations and growth. We are excited to be part of Marco’s journey to support the suppliers that are the backbone of global trade.”

During the most recent quarter, only a few earnings reports stood out from the rest. Zoom’s set of results were one of them, with the video-communications company showing enormous acceleration as the world replaced in-person contact with remote chat.

Another was Peloton’s earnings from the fourth quarter of its fiscal 2020, which it reported September 10th. The company’s revenue and profitability spiked as folks stuck at home turned to the connected fitness company’s wares.

---

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

---

Shares of Peloton have rallied around 4x since March, roughly the start of when the COVID-19 pandemic began to impact life in the United States, driving demand for the company’s at-home workout equipment. And in late June, athleisure company Lululemon bought Mirror, another connected fitness company aimed at the home market for around $500 million.

With Peloton’s 2019 IPO and its growth along with Mirror’s exit in 2020, connected fitness is demonstrably hot, and private-market investors are taking notice. A recent Tweet from fitness tech watcher Joe Vennare detailing a host of recent funding rounds raised by “digital fitness” companies made the point last week, piquing our curiosity at the same time.

Is there really some sort of Peloton effect driving private investment into lots of connected fitness startups? How hot is the more nascent side of connected fitness?

This morning let’s take a look through some recent funding rounds in the space to get a feel for what’s going on. (If you’re a VC who cares about the sector, feel free to email in your own notes, subject line “connected fitness” please.) We’ll then execute the same search for Q3 2019 and see how the data compares.

Hot Wheels

To start with the current market I pulled a Crunchbase query for all Q3 funding rounds for companies tagged as “fitness” and then filtered out the cruft to get a look at the most pertinent funding events.

Here’s what I came up for for Q3 2020, to date:

• Zwift’s $450 million Series C. (TechCrunch coverage)
• Tonal’s $110 million Series D. (TechCrunch coverage)
  
  

Biotech has become one of the hottest areas of venture investment in recent years, as progress in machine learning, genetics, medical devices, and biology fuse together into new products for the gargantuan health industry.

Case in point: Grail, which began in 2016 as a spinoff from genetic sequencing giant Illumina and co-founded by longtime Google executive Jeff Huber (who was involved in the creation of the company’s experimental laboratory Google[x]), is now being spun back in to the tune of an $8 billion acquisition announced this morning.

Illumina originally invested $100 million in the spinout, and Grail would go on to raise more than a billion dollars in funding from prominent biotech firm ARCH, one of China’s top VCs Hillhouse Capital, among many others according to Crunchbase.

Grail’s technology was designed to use modern genetic sequencing tools coupled with data science to detect cancer earlier than other competing products on the market.

As we discussed on TechCrunch back in 2017 when the company raised $900 million, “while liquid biopsies to detect cancer aren’t anything new and GRAIL will have to compete with several other contenders both large and small, the technology to take a blood sample and detect the early, free-floating cancer DNA floating in your bloodstream is revolutionary in the industry and only made possible through new DNA sequencing machinery.”

Cancer screening is a $100 billion market and growing rapidly, particularly internationally as countries like China and India develop economically and more patients require active screening. Detecting cancer early is pivotal for reducing mortality risk, and so Grail’s promise was to offer the “holy grail” (couldn’t help myself) for saving these lives. According to the U.S. government, roughly 600,000 people will die this year from cancer, and it is a leading cause of death.

As part of the deal, Grail will receive $3.5 billion in cash, with another $4.5 billion earmarked for Illumina stock. The company set a deadline of December 20th for consummating the acquisition, at which point Illumina will begin offering Grail $35 million per month in cash payments until the deal closes. The two companies have signed a $315 million merger termination agreement as part of the deal.

The acquisition is subject to customary regulatory review.

Biotech has become one of the hottest areas of venture investment in recent years, as progress in machine learning, genetics, medical devices, and biology fuse together into new products for the gargantuan health industry.

Case in point: Grail, which began in 2016 as a spinoff from genetic sequencing giant Illumina and co-founded by longtime Google executive Jeff Huber (who was involved in the creation of the company’s experimental laboratory Google[x]), is now being spun back in to the tune of an $8 billion acquisition announced this morning.

Illumina originally invested $100 million in the spinout, and Grail would go on to raise more than a billion dollars in funding from prominent biotech firm ARCH, one of China’s top VCs Hillhouse Capital, among many others according to Crunchbase.

Grail’s technology was designed to use modern genetic sequencing tools coupled with data science to detect cancer earlier than other competing products on the market.

As we discussed on TechCrunch back in 2017 when the company raised $900 million, “while liquid biopsies to detect cancer aren’t anything new and GRAIL will have to compete with several other contenders both large and small, the technology to take a blood sample and detect the early, free-floating cancer DNA floating in your bloodstream is revolutionary in the industry and only made possible through new DNA sequencing machinery.”

Cancer screening is a $100 billion market and growing rapidly, particularly internationally as countries like China and India develop economically and more patients require active screening. Detecting cancer early is pivotal for reducing mortality risk, and so Grail’s promise was to offer the “holy grail” (couldn’t help myself) for saving these lives. According to the U.S. government, roughly 600,000 people will die this year from cancer, and it is a leading cause of death.

As part of the deal, Grail will receive $3.5 billion in cash, with another $4.5 billion earmarked for Illumina stock. The company set a deadline of December 20th for consummating the acquisition, at which point Illumina will begin offering Grail $35 million per month in cash payments until the deal closes. The two companies have signed a $315 million merger termination agreement as part of the deal.

The acquisition is subject to customary regulatory review.

NBCUniversal and Roku announced late last week that they’d resolved the dispute that was keeping NBCU’s streaming Peacock app off Roku’s smart TV platform. And as of this morning, Peacock has launched on Roku .

When Peacock launched in July, it was not available on either Roku or Amazon Fire TV — in Roku’s case, the reported issue was how much of Peacock’s ad inventory Roku would be able to sell.

The dispute escalated on Friday, with NBCU threatening to pull its TV Everywhere apps from Roku as well. Instead, the day ended with the companies announcing a deal.

“We are pleased to have reached an agreement with [NBCU parent company] Comcast that will bring Peacock to Roku customers and maintains access to NBCU’s TV Everywhere apps,” Roku said in a statement. “We look forward to offering these new options to consumers under an expanded, mutually beneficial relationship between our companies that includes adding NBC content to The Roku Channel and a meaningful partnership around advertising.”

NBCU still hasn’t announced a deal that would bring Peacock to Fire TV. And HBO Max, the other new streaming app from a major media company, still isn’t available on either Roku or Fire TV.

Peacock is available in a number of different tiers, with a free, ad-supported plan offering a select library of NBCU content, with more content (including Peacock originals like “Brave New World”) available for $4.99 a month, and then an ad-free tier that costs $9.99 per month.

“We are excited to bring Peacock and its unrivaled catalog to millions of Americans who enjoy entertainment on their favorite Roku devices,” said Maggie McLean Suniewick, Peacocck’s president of business development and partnerships, in a statement. “Roku customers are engaged streamers and we know they’ll love access to a wide range of free and paid content.”

One of the more salient trends in the tech world — arguably the engine that propels it — has been the recurring theme of people who hone talents at bigger companies and then strike out on their own to found their own startups.

(Some, like Max Levchin, even hire entrepreneurial types intentionally to help perpetuate this cycle and get more proactive teams in place.)

It turns out that trend doesn’t just apply to companies, but also to the investors who back them. At Disrupt we talked with three venture capitalists who have followed that path: making their names and cutting their teeth at major firms, and now building their own “startup” funds on their own steam.

On the macro level, the whole world has been living through a challenging time this year. But as we’ve seen time and again the wheels have continued to turn in the tech world.

IPOs are returning, products are being rolled out, people are buying a lot online and using the internet to stay connected, there has been a lot of M&A, and promising startups are getting funded.

Indeed, if entrepreneurs and their innovations are the engine of the tech world, money is the fuel, and that is the opportunity that Dayna Grayson (formerly of NEA, now founder at Construct Capital), Renata Quintini (formerly at Lux Capital, now founder at Renegade Partners) and Lo Toney (formerly GV, now founder at Plexo Capital) have zeroed in to address.

Grayson said that part of the reason for striking out to start Construct Capital with co-founder Rachel Holt was what they saw as an opportunity to create a firm that specifically funded startups tackling the industrial sector:

“Half the US economy’s GDP, half the GDP of this country, hasn’t really been digitized,” she said. “[Firms] haven’t been tech enabled. They’ve been way under invested… The time is now to build with early stage entrepreneurs.”

While Construct is focusing on a sector, Renegade was founded to focus on something else: the stage of development for a startup, and specific the Series B, which the firm refers to as “supercritical”, essential in terms of getting team and strategy right after a startup is no longer just starting out, but before and leading to scaled growth.

“We saw through our boards over and over again companies that figured out how to scale their organizations, put in the processes,” said Quintini, who co-founded Renegade with Roseanne Wincek. “On the people side, they actually went further and captured a lot more market cap and market share faster. Once we saw this opportunity, we could not let it go.”

She compares the current imperative to really focus on how to build and scale companies at the “supercritical” stage to the focus on early stage funding that typified an earlier period in the development of the startup ecosystem 15 years ago. “You could get a million dollars and be in business, a lot more people could, and you had less time to figure out what really resonated with customers,” she said. “That really gave rise to today.”

Toney has taken yet another approach, focusing not on sector, nor stage, but using capital to help germinate a whole new demographic of founders, the premise being that funding a more diverse and inclusive mix of founders is not just good for creating a more level playing field, but also for the good of more well-rounded products that speak to a wider population of users.

“I was having a great time at GV, but I just saw this opportunity as being one that was too hard to resist,” said Toney of founding Plexo, which invests not just in startups but in funds that are following a similar investment principle to his. Investing in both funds and founders is something GV did as well, but the added ability to turn that into investing with a social imperative was important. “To have this byproduct of increasing diversity and inclusion in the ecosystem [is something] I’m super passionate about,” he said. 

We are living through a time when the tech world seems to be awash in capital. One of the byproducts of having so many successful tech companies has been limited partners rushing in to back more VCs in hopes of also getting some of the spoils: many firms are closing funds in record times, oversubscribed, and that’s having a knock-on effect not just terms of startups getting funded, but VCs themselves also multiplying with increasing frequency. All three said that the fact that the all identify as more than just “another new VC”, with specific purposes, also makes it easier for them to get themselves noticed to get involved in good deals.

Grayson said that the challenge of starting a firm in the midst of a global pandemic turned out to be a piece of good fortune in disguise in an industry that thrives on the concept of “disruption” (as we at TechCrunch know all too well…).

“We were really lucky that we started investing in a COVID world,” she said. “So many things have been up ended. And I think, you know, software adoption and technology adoption have been moved up 10-20 years in industry. [And] the way that we work together really has changed.” She also said that they’ve found themselves almost looking for companies “created in a COVID environment”, which indeed would qualify as a battle-tested business model.

In terms of raising funds themselves, Toney also recalled the period when we saw a real surge of VCs emerging to fund companies at the seed stage, and the growth of “solo capitalists” around that.

“I think what’s really interesting about solo capitalists is [how] they take their understanding of operations, and a deep network of other technologists, both from big companies as well as entrepreneurs, and … leverage access to all that deal flow by going out and actually raising capital from other sources, whether that be high net worth individuals or family offices or even institutions,” he said.

Palantir is not a democracy, and it really, really, really wants you to know that.

Palantir’s governance has been under an exacting lens from regulators the past few weeks as it prepares for a public direct listing on September 29th. In revision after revision of its S-1 filing to the SEC — now totaling eight including its draft registration statements — the company has had to continuously explain and re-explain what exactly it is trying to do to prevent retail investors from controlling the company.

Little surprise then that its 5th amended S-1 filing, published this morning, shows even more disclosures about the pitifully small governance control that retail investors will have upon the company’s public market debut.

In a newly added line, the company admits that “holders of our Class A common stock [i.e. the stock that will trade on NYSE starting September 29th] will hold approximately 3.4% of the voting power of our outstanding capital stock.”

“Voting power” is clearly very important to regulators — the term is now used 168 times in Palantir’s latest amended S-1 filing, up from just 58 in its original filing just a few weeks ago. In fact, take a look at this amazing chart on just how much Palantir has had to explain voting power to regulators over the past few weeks in filing after filing:

Indeed, just to prove how much voting power retail investors are giving up, the company published another column to its infamous founder-ownership table that I discussed at length on Friday. As part of the three-class voting share structure Palantir is using, its founders will retain outsized voting control of the company through what are known as Class F or founders shares, so long as they meet a minimal ownership threshold.

 

How unbalanced can that voting be? In the most extreme scenario according to Palantir’s newly updated table, its founders could control 68.099999% of the company’s vote while owning just 0.5% of the company’s shares.

In addition, the company has also added a new risk factor reminding owners of the company’s stock that Palantir can issue new stock at any time, and those newly issued shares will dilute retail investors even further in their voting rights relative to founders, who are offered a variable number of votes to ensure they maintain control of the company.

It gets worse though. Palantir has been promulgating this arcane mechanism over the last few amendments to the SEC that would allow its three founders — Alex Karp, Stephen Cohen, and Peter Thiel — to designate certain shares to be held outside of their “founder shares” and therefore increase their overall voting power. In its last amendment, the only founder to designate shares in this way was Peter Thiel, who designated a huge bulk of his shares (13.4% of Palantir) as excluded from the founders share calculation.

Now in its latest update, Palantir says that founders will be able to increase their votes essentially willy-nilly by designating any or all of their shares as “Stockholder Party Excluded Shares” which will be voted separately from their founder shares. And the right to do this will last from the company’s public debut all the way to “in the future.” In short, Palantir’s founders will hold 49.999999% control through their founder shares, plus the votes of any excluded shares, to be determined at any time. As of today, no shares have been designated as excluded according to the filing.

That leads to one of my new favorite admissions in this whole governance saga: Palantir won’t be able to tell anyone what their actual voting power is, even when they are just about to vote. From its newly amended filing:

In addition, it may be very difficult for our Class A common stockholders to determine from time to time, including in advance of a meeting of stockholders, their individual or aggregate voting power due to the unique features of our multi-class capital structure, such as the variable number of votes per share of our Class F common stock and the ability of our Founders who are then party to the Founder Voting Agreement to unilaterally adjust their total voting power, for example, by designating shares as Stockholder Party Excluded Shares, as described in more detail herein.

The complexity of Palantir’s three-class voting system means that no one basically knows what the hell is going on. “Unilaterally adjust their total voting power” is not a democracy, indeed.

There’s good news though! Palantir might actually add — I kid you not — another class of voting shares just to make all of this is even more complicated!

In another new disclosure this morning, the company writes that “In addition, in the future we could create a new class of equity securities with different economic or voting rights than existing classes” and explains how that could upend the voting for the company further.

I joked last week that “For a company vaunted for its clandestine government work and strong engineering culture, you can’t help but wonder if the government’s bureaucratic norms and paperwork pushing are starting to flood into the Shire.” Well, the complexity is only getting worse and worse and it doesn’t look good.

Tech companies, even those publicly traded, aren’t democracies. The two-class voting system most tech companies offer their founders and early investors are not democratic — some people get 1 vote per share while others get 10 votes per share. But it has become a norm whether we like it or not, and it’s directionally helped tech companies avoid the sort of hostile investor scenarios that have plagued other companies in the market.

Now, Palantir is stretching these notions to the extreme, trying to present as a shareholder-centered corporation when it is — let’s just admit it — an oligarchy of three.

It’s a bit like reading the People’s Republic of China constitution and finding this section in Chapter 2: “All citizens of the People’s Republic of China are equal before the law. The State respects and preserves human rights. … Citizens of the People’s Republic of China enjoy freedom of speech, of the press, of assembly, of association, of procession and of demonstration.” And you are like, what?

Words don’t mean anything when the votes and the system aren’t there.

Facebook today is introducing a new tool that will allow rights holders to protect and manage their photos across both Facebook and Instagram. With the newly launched “Rights Manager for Images,” Facebook is offering creators and publishers access to content matching technology similar to what it introduced in 2016 to combat stolen videos. The new feature, which is available in Facebook’s Creator Studio, will allow rights owners to assert control over their intellectual property across Facebook and Instagram, including when the image is embedded on an external website.

As with Facebook’s existing Rights Manager for video content, creators who want to assert their control over their images will have to provide Facebook with a copy of the images they want to protect as well as a CSV file with image metadata, as a first step. These are uploaded to a reference library that Rights Manager uses to locate matches across both Facebook and Instagram.

The creator doesn’t have to publicly post their images on Facebook or Instagram for this process to work.

When matching content is found on a Page or a profile, the rights holder can choose whether to simply monitor the content, block its use through a takedown request, or attribute credit to themselves via an ownership link. Creators can also choose whether or not they want their ownership to apply worldwide or only in certain geographic locations.

The new feature is designed more for those who maintain a large catalog of images or who post new content on a regular basis. For individuals who only occasionally encounter issues around misuse of their images, Facebook offers an IP reporting form instead, which even allows users to report more than one piece of matching content at a time.

The topic of who has the rights to use a photo that’s been posted on Facebook, and in particular, the image-heavy site Instagram, has become more controversial in recent months.

Many had long believed that embedding an Instagram post on their own website was a perfectly legal use case. But when Newsweek asked to feature a photographer’s image and they declined, the publication ran it as an embed, which then opened them up to a copyright lawsuit, filed this summer.

Newsweek had assumed the embed was legally permissible, given that Mashable recently won a similar copyright case in the recent past. But following the Newsweek case, Instagram clarified that its embedding feature didn’t include a license — if someone wanted to use the photo, they would need to ensure they had the proper license to do so. That bit of information came as something of a surprise and the case with Mashable was reopened as a result.

Until now, photographers had limited means of protecting their content across Facebook’s platforms. They could only take actions like enabling or disabling embedding entirely or making their account private, for example, to ensure their content wasn’t used and distributed without their permission. Of course, neither solution was ideal for a photographer trying to gain exposure and grow their career.

The Rights Manager for Images will now allow them a third option, as it’s capable of finding and matching images that have been used as embeds. At that point, the creator could choose to monitor, block or or allow the image as they choose, a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch.

Facebook says access to the new Rights Manager for Images will be opened up initially those who apply here.

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest big news, chats about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here — and don’t forget to check out last Friday’s episode.

What a busy morning. We had to cover TikTok . We had to talk VC rounds. So, this is what we got up to:

• US tech stocks are poised to sell off further this morning.
• The Oracle-TikTok-Walmart-ByteDance deal is either coming into focus, or a period of even less clarity. It’s hard to tell.
• Nikola founder Trevor Milton is leaving the board of his own company in the wake of fraud allegations. Shares of the company are sharply lower in pre-market trading.
• Turning to TikTok, this primer represents the best over-the-weekend roundup that we could find. But, of course, things are still breaking as we come to print.
• Since recording, Oracle has said that “upon creation of TikTok Global, Oracle/Walmart will make their investment and the TikTok Global shares will be distributed to their owners, Americans will be the majority and ByteDance will have no ownership in TikTok Global.” And, President Trump said this morning that China has to give up control of TikTok or the deal is off. ByteDance has said that it will retain control. You figure that out.
• But there was some good stuff to chat about. Including the super-neat Mobile Premier League round worth $90 million, growth news from EU-based Babbel, a new London-based Seed fund that got raised, and a Swedish healthtech Series B.
• As you guessed from today’s title, it was fun to see such a concentration of EU VC activity.
• Finally, will the Nikola mess discourage more SPACs from taking companies public? If the rest of the stock market wasn’t selling off, we would have said no. But today? Is the answer maybe?