Month: September 2020

Zymergen, one of the companies that’s developing biomanufacturing technologies which could reshape any number of industries, said it has raised $300 million in financing yesterday.

It’s part of a wave of biotech companies that TechCrunch covered in depth last month.

The investment total, announced yesterday, includes Series D funding led by Baillie Gifford, and joined by Baron Capital Group and one of the world’s largest sovereign wealth funds, as well as additional growth financing from Perceptive Advisors, the company said. A number of current investors are also returning, and Zymergen expects to raise additional capital in Q4 as part of a Series D round, according to a statement.

The new capital will be used to accelerate manufacturing of the company’s Hyaline film, which should be used seen in commercial products as soon as next year, according to the company.

Zymergen has partnered with companies like Sumitomo, the Japanese chemical conglomerate, and FMC, a US-based pesticide and agricultural products developer, to bring its novel biologically-based chemicals to market.

“We built Zymergen to make revolutionary hi-performance products that outshine existing materials while dramatically reducing environmental impacts from manufacturing, transportation and more,” said Zymergen CEO Josh Hoffman. “This is the right investment for this moment, advancing our transformational long-term vision and bringing real products to market.”

Remote working has become the norm for many of us not on the frontlines, and what’s been notable is that this is also changing the mindset for a lot of organizations, which are now hiring from an increasingly global talent pool. Today, a startup called Deel — which provides payroll, compliance tools and other services to help businesses do that in a more seamless way — is announcing $30 million in new funding to double down on the opportunity.

“We want to give access to services that remote workforces have typically not had access to,” said Alex Bouaziz, the CEO who co-founded the company with Shuo Wang (the CRO). “We want to be the platform for employees and contractors who are working abroad. We went to give them all the same level of care as employees working in the main office.”

The Series B is being led by Spark Capital and comes closely on the heels of Deel raising $14 million  in a Series A only a few months ago led by Andreessen Horowitz. The company is an alum of Y Combinator and also counts the incubator, along with Nat Friedman, Ryan Petersen, John Zimmer, William Hockey and Alexis Ohanian, among its investors.

Deel has now raised some $48 million to date, and while Bouaziz said that the startup is not disclosing valuation, he did confirm that its grown three-fold since May.

That may sound like a very rapid (too rapid?) progression, but it speaks to the company’s momentum — it’s now being used by more than 500 companies (adding over 100 since May) and covering thousands of employees across 140+ countries. And it speaks to the specific market area in which it’s working and the demand for what Deel offers.

In the words of Spark’s general partner Yasmin Razavi, who led the investment for the firm after proactively reaching out to Bouaziz over Twitter to get acquainted, all of the buzz these days is about workforce productivity tools and cloud services to manage data securely and efficiently among distributed people, but Deel is helping fix something even more fundamental.

“Everyone keeps talking about tools like Slack, Notion and Zoom as enablers,” she said, “but the reality is that if you can’t hire and pay people, there is no workforce.”

The company today already provides a range of tools to employees and the organizations that they work for such as payroll services, tax compliance information, assistance on building contracts, invoicing services and a range of insurance options covering health and other areas related to working life.

The range of services currently includes lots of localised options: the contract tools, for example, help organizations build contracts that comply with local labor laws; the payroll offers different options localised for the best way to pay people in specific markets; and Deel provides comparative scenarios for employers to figure out if it’s best to keep people on contracts or take them on full time.

Now the plan is to continue building out those tools with more services aimed at both the workers and their employers. That includes loans based on salary for workers, more insurance and benefits options, and so on. Interestingly, the fact that Deel offers so many integrated services that include recurring payments means that its lifecycle with customers (and within the bigger two-sided marketplace, with employees) extends beyond simply just onboarding workers.

Razavi, Bouaziz and Wang are themselves the products of the rapid workforce globalisation that Deel has identified and builds products to support. The two co-founders met as students at MIT, but Wang comes from China, and Bouaziz is from Paris with family also in Israel, while Razavi herself is from Canada.

All effectively converged in what had become the de facto center of the tech universe, San Francisco — but these days they are not at all in the same places. Razavi spoke to me from Toronto, where she was quarantining before returning to the US after a necessary trip to Portugal. Bouaziz spoke to me from Israel, where he went to see his family at the very start of the pandemic and has remained ever since. Wang is still in San Francisco for the moment.

It’s anyone’s guess where the three will be a year from now, and the point of Deel is that the company’s tools remove that variable from the equation. If things continue the way they have for the last eight months, that variable — where are you working from? — is going to be an increasingly common one, but with the help of a service like Deel’s, not a deal-breaker when it comes to getting a job or hiring the right person for a role.

There are a number of other companies out there that are disrupting the very incumbent world of payroll services, including the likes of Gusto and Rippling. The interesting thing with Deel is how it has focused squarely on the opportunity of providing services for people who are working across national borders. If that does become more commonplace, it’s likely to see significantly more competition, but for now, it’s a huge opportunity that’s only just opening up.

The UK government has published a national data strategy today, setting out a plan to promote the use and prioritize the reuse of data as a lever for economic growth and digital innovation. It has also opened up a 12-week public consultation on the policy plan.

The top-line message from the secretary of state for digital, Oliver Dowden, is that government wants the “high watermark” of data sharing that’s been seen in the UK during the pandemic to be the new normal for the 2020s — greasing the pipe for “businesses, government and organisations to innovate, experiment and drive a new era of growth”, as he puts it.

 

“The new strategy will look at how the country can leverage existing UK strengths to boost use of data in business, government and civil society,” the government writes. “It proposes an overhaul in the use of data across the public sector and the government will launch a programme of work to transform the way data is managed, used and shared internally and with wider public sectors organisations, to create an ethical, joined up and interoperable data infrastructure.”

By “data” the policy paper makes it clear that the government means the whole ‘kit & caboodle’ — aka “information about people, things and systems” — though the focus of the strategy is purely on digital data, not information held on paper.

“Given the significant technological changes of the last five years, and the more significant changes we expect to see throughout the 2020s, we need a data strategy that reflects the opportunities and challenges of our new hyper-digital world, and ensures that the decisions, priorities and potential trade-offs that we face are considered in a deliberate and evidence-driven way,” it goes on.

In the early stages of the pandemic, the UK quickly inked a number of health data-sharing deals with tech giants including Google and Palantir — granting access to health information on millions of UK citizens to develop a data platform to coordinate its response to the COVID-19 public health crisis.

At the time it touted the power of “secure, reliable and timely data” to inform “effective” pandemic decisions. Though the arrangements have attracted controversy over their scope and lack of transparency.

Now the government is saying it wants this ‘pandemic level’ of urgency to apply everyday, accelerating data sharing across government and beyond regardless of whether or not there’s a burning health emergency.

To feed its grand ambition of data-fuelled ‘levelling up’ of the public sector, the policy paper sets out a major civil service upskilling plan — with the government saying it wants 500 data analysts across the public sector to be trained in data science by 2021. The Office for National Statistics will play a central role here, with the training being delivered by its Data Science Campus.

The government also plans to offer up to ten “innovation” fellowships per year — with the aim of attracting “world-class tech talent” to work with it to support digital transformation in the public sector. It says the fellowships are modelled on a similar US scheme which attracted the lead developer on Google Maps, former CEO of Symantec and co-founder of the Earth Genome Project to work on US government projects.

“Those fellows will sit within No 10, the Government Digital Service and a number of departments, and use their skills to contribute to the kind of fulfilling challenging projects that only the public sector can offer — ones that have a huge impact on society as a whole,” it writes.

A new government Chief Data Officer will also be appointed to lead a “whole-government” approach to transforming data use — with a focus on driving efficiency in public service delivery. This role is in addition to a new Chief Digital Officer post announced last month.

“To help arm the next generation with high quality data skills, the Government will explore new ways to teach undergraduate students data skills that complement the existing current maths and computing curriculums, as well as developing T-Levels which include qualifications on digital skills,” it adds in a press release.

There’s a strong, Brexit-fuelled, de-regulatory whiff to the strategy — with the paper containing lines like: “Having left the European Union, the UK will champion the benefits that data can deliver”; and: “We will promote domestic best practice and work with international partners to ensure data is not inappropriately constrained by national borders and fragmented regulatory regimes so that it can be used to its full potential.”

Yet the government also writes that it’s committed to seeking “positive adequacy decisions from the EU, under both the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) and the Law Enforcement Directive (LED), before the end of the [Brexit] transition period”. Although, of course, it’s hardly going to say it wouldn’t like a nice data deal with the EU.

Without an EU data adequacy decision, a post-Brexit UK will be treated by the bloc as what’s known as a ‘third country’ — piling legal risk and friction on data transfers from the EU, with huge implications for the UK’s digital services sector. Per the government’s press release, “data-enabled” UK service exports were valued an estimated £243BN in 2019, or 75 per cent of total service exports — and a major chunk of that business involves EU citizens’ data. So any future barriers to EU to UK data transfers risk blowing a very sizeable hole in the economic component of the strategy.

The UK’s prospects of securing a data adequacy decision from the Commission will depend on how aligned it is with relevant EU regulations. And EU lawmakers confirmed this month that a recent court ruling by Europe’s top court (aka Schrems II) — which struck down a recent data adequacy agreement between the EU and the US — has implications for a post-Brexit Britain (which has its own swingeing surveillance regime).

So the UK’s high level talk here of adopting ‘data maximizing’ domestic standards and blasting through regulatory constraints appears to deny the existence of international standards, international law and geopolitics. It may also be viewed dimly in Brussels if the comments are interpreted as they sound, i.e. like a sideswipe at current EU data standards.

On international data flows the UK strategy also targets what it dubs “unjustified barriers” to cross border data flows — such as localization requirements to store/process data in a particular country.

“The UK will take a leading role in encouraging the removal of such barriers to unlock the growth potential of global digital trade,” it writes, adding that it will seek provisions with trade partners (including via its current negotiations with the EU) to prevent “the use of unjustified data localisation measures”.

The tension between the UK’s desire to slash barriers to data sharing as a strategy to drive economic growth and the parallel need to operate a “trusted” data regime to maintain public trust — and, indeed, access international data — are evident elsewhere in the policy paper, where the government writes: “We want our data protection laws to remain fit for purpose amid rapid technological change.” [emphasis ours]

“To build a world-leading data economy, we must maintain and bolster a data regime that is not too burdensome for the average company — one that helps innovators and entrepreneurs to use data legitimately to build and expand their businesses, without undue regulatory uncertainty or risk in the UK and globally,” the government goes on.

“Given the rapid innovation of data-intensive technologies, we also need a data regime that is neither unnecessarily complex nor vague. Businesses need certainty to thrive, and the government will work with regulators to prioritise timely, simple and practical guidance, especially for emerging technologies, and create more opportunities to experiment safely.”

On the latter, the strategy talks about testing the “possibilities” of sharing data between the public and private spheres.

Specifically, it’s announced a plan to fire up a cottage industry for AI -powered content moderation tools — seemingly to underpin a wider plan to regulate online harms — via a new £2.6M project which it says will “model how improved systems for classification and sharing of data could support a competitive commercial market in tools able to detect online harms such as cyberbullying, harassment or suicide ideation”.

Here’s more from the press release:

The Online Harms Data Infrastructure project is a new £2.6m pilot project, funded through the HM Treasury Shared Outcomes Fund, to explore how improved systems for data sharing and data interoperability could support innovation and competition in the detection of online harms. This project will analyse the current data landscape and the economic and social benefits of opening up online harms data, and then test a number of potential practical solutions. It forms part of the wider programme of work led by DCMS and Home Office to make the UK the safest place in the world to go online, and the best place to grow and start a digital business.

Through this programme, the government says it will “review and upgrade the data standards and systems that underpin the monitoring and reporting of online harms such as child sexual abuse, hate speech and self harm and suicide ideation”, per the policy paper — which, again, is a reference to its ambitious plan to regulate online content by imposing a duty of care on platforms.

It’s not clear how the government proposes to enable the sharing of such sensitive user data with commercial entities via this program without major data protection risks.

“Beyond the commitment to open data, the government has long recognised that new models and approaches are needed to drive value from data and data systems that span the private and public sector – this is particularly important in cases where the data itself is not appropriate to be shared as open data, be it for privacy, national security or commercial reasons,” is all the policy paper has to say on that.

It’s worth noting that the government has dipped its toe in the water on the public-private AI content moderation front before now. Back in 2018, the then Home Secretary announced a machine learning tool, developed with public money by a UK AI firm, which it claimed could automatically detect propaganda produced by the Islamic State terror group with “an extremely high degree of accuracy” — as it sought to amp up pressure on Internet giants to accelerate takedowns of terrorist content.

As an extended aside, the UK company that developed that tool was called ASI Data Science. The company has since rebranded to Faculty — a name that may be familiar as it’s one of tech firms granted access to UK citizens’ health data as part of the government’s COVID-19 response data platform. (That Faculty contract — providing “strategic support to the NHSX AI Lab” — had a value in excess of £1M.)

The firm has in fact won a swathe of UK government contracts in recent years, since working on the pro-Brexit Vote Leave campaign with senior government advisor (and defacto data guru in chief), Dominic Cummings. So you can at least see one clear thread running right through this national data strategy.

In another component of the plan that could open up startup opportunities, the government says it wants to expand on the current “Smart Data” initiatives — such as the Open Banking scheme — to enable service switching and innovation across more sectors via regulated data sharing.

On this it says it will bring forward primary legislation to give people “the power to use their own data to find better tariffs in areas such as telecoms, energy and pensions, and open the doors to disruptors in every part of the marketplace”.

“The government is committed to an economy where consumers’ data works for them, and innovative businesses thrive. We expect that, in time, the extension of Smart Data will deliver new and innovative services, stronger competition in the affected markets, and better prices and choice for consumers and small businesses, including through reduced bureaucracy. Competitive data-driven markets can reduce friction for business and drive start-ups, investment and job creation,” it adds.

UK business groups have welcomed the government’s plan. In a response statement, Felicity Burch, director of digital and innovation, for the CBI, said: “Data underpins the modern economy and is essential to businesses in every sector from logistics to retail. It’s at the heart of global trade, competition, and innovation in areas from health to climate change. We welcome the National Data Strategy as a vital step for the UK be at the forefront of the data revolution. Lessons learnt in the coronavirus crisis must power our economic recovery – crucially, unleashing the power of data in a way that commands trust and empowers people.”

The government’s PR also includes a very supportive statement from Darren Hardman, general manager for Amazon Web Services (UK and Ireland) — with the tech giant eyeing massive upsides in any wholesale public sector shift to big, interoperable, cloud-hosted data. “Making more effective use of data and cloud computing is key to the UK’s long-term economic growth and the continual improvement of our public services,” he suggests. “We welcome the launch of this consultation on the new National Data Strategy, which will be instrumental in ensuring the UK remains one of the world’s leading digital nations.”

Other responses are more circumspect — with a warning of the risks of “over-collection” and “inappropriate use”, of data coming from Dr Jeni Tennison, VP at the Open Data Institute.

“People and organisations of all kinds are facing big challenges over the next few years. Data can help us all to navigate them, increasing our understanding of our changing world and informing the decisions we make. Data can also cause harm, for example through over-collection and inappropriate use. At the ODI, we want data to work for everyone, which means ensuring it both gets to the people who need it, and that it is collected, used and shared in trustworthy ways,” she said in a statement.

“This National Data Strategy consultation is an important opportunity for us all to explore and influence how data should be used to support the UK’s economy, environment and communities, and we look forward to the debate.”

The consultation on the UK national data strategy can be found here.

The EU recently announced its own strategy aimed at boosting data reuse to drive economic growth — although that focuses on industrial and non-personal data, with rules for personal data sharing continuing to be regulated via the GDPR.

Sprinklr has been busy the last few years acquiring a dozen companies, then rewriting their code base and incorporating them into the company’s customer experience platform. Today, the late-stage startup went back to the fund raising well for the first time in three years, and it was a doozy, raising $200 million on a $2.7 billion valuation.

The money came from private equity firm Hellman & Friedman, who also invested $300 million in buying back secondary shares. Meanwhile the company also announced $150 million in convertible securities from Sixth Street Growth. That’s a lot of action for a company that’s been quiet on the fund raising front for three years.

Company founder and CEO Ragy Thomas says he sought the investment now because after building a customer experience platform, he was ready to accelerate and he needed the money to do it. He expects the company to hit $400 million in annual recurring revenue by year’s end and he says that he sees a much bigger opportunity on the horizon.

“We think it’s a $100 billion opportunity and our large public competitors have validated that and continue to do so in the customer experience management space,” he said. Those large competitors include Salesforce and Adobe.

He sees customer experience management as having the kind of growth that CRM has had in the past, and this money gives him more options to grow faster, while working with a big private equity firm.

“So what was appealing in this market for us was not just putting some more money in the bank and being a little more aggressive in growth, innovation, go to market and potential M&A, but what was also appealing is the opportunity to bring someone like a Hellman & Friedman to the table,” Thomas said.

The company has 10,000 clients, some spending millions of dollars a year. They currently have 1900 employees in 25 offices around the world, and Thomas wants to add another 500 over the next 12 months, — and he believes that $1 billion in ARR is a realistic goal for the company.

As he builds the company Thomas, who is a person of color, has codified diversity and inclusion into the company’s charter, what he calls the “Sprinklr Way.” For us, diversity and inclusion is not impossible. It is not something that you do to check a box and market yourself. It’s deep in our DNA,” he said.

Tarim Wasim a partner at investor Hellman & Friedman, sees a company with tremendous potential to lead a growing market. “Sprinklr has a unique opportunity to lead a Customer Experience Management market that’s already massive — and growing — as enterprises continue to realize the urgent need to put CXM at the heart of their digital transformation strategy,” Wasim said in a statement.

Sprinklr was founded in 2009. Before today, it last raised $105 million in 2016 led by Temasek Holdings. Past investors include Battery Ventures, ICONIQ Capital and Intel Capital.

NotCo, the Chilean food technology company making plant-based milk and meat replacements, has confirmed the close of a new $85 million round of funding to take the company’s products into the US market.

The announcement confirms earlier reporting from TechCrunch that the company had raised new capital, but according to people with knowledge of the investment, the valuation for the company is roughly $300 million, and not the $250 million TechCrunch previously reported.

The funding came from new investors including the consumer-focused private equity firm L Catterton Partners, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone’s Future Positive investment firm, and the giant venture capital firm, General Catalyst. Previous investors including Kaszek Ventures, The Craftory, Bezos Expeditions (the personal investment firm for Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos), Endeavor Catalyst, IndieBio, Humbolt Capital and Maya Capital, all of which have followed on in this round.

NotCo makes a hamburger substitute that’s currently being marketed at Burger King and Papa John’s restaurants in Chile as part of its NotBurger and NotMeat brands and has a line of dairy products including NotIceCream, NotMayo and NotMilk.

Both markets are not small. With milk alone being a multi-billion dollar category that NotCo chief executive Matias Muchnick believes his company can dominate in both Latin America and the US. That trajectory will put it on a collision course with well-funded competitors like Perfect Day, which raised $300 million in financing earlier this year and launched a new consumer brand subsidiary, the Urgent Company, for products made with its milk substitutes.

For longtime investors in the company, like Kaszek Ventures managing partner, Nicolas Szekasy, the new financing for NotCo validates his firm’s early faith that a company from Santiago, Chile could compete in some of the world’s largest consumer markets.

“We continue to actively support the company since its early days with a strong conviction of the potential that NotCo has to be the leading global player in the food-tech space. In this uncertain time, consumers have amplified their appetite for the plant-based world,” said Szekasy in a statement. “In parallel, COVID has allowed us to see that meat production is not only environmentally harmful and inefficient, but also that its supply chain is fragile. So we are happy to witness an inflection point where plant-based products are becoming an increasing proportion of a new normal, once they can actually taste amazing like we see NotCo crafting.”

Joining the company to help with its international expansion plans are a clutch of seasoned executives from large multi-national food brands. Flavia Buchmann, a former executive at Coca-Cola overseeing the company’s Sprite brand has been tapped as the company’s new chief marketing officer. Former Danone executives Luis Silva and Catriel Giuliano are taking the reins as heads of global business development and research and development, respectively. And Jose Menendez a former banker at Jeffries and executive at Tapad, is now NotCo’s global chief operating officer.

A flood of venture capital dollars have come into the food space since NotCo first burst on the scene and many of these deals are operating at the intersection of novel biomanufacturing technologies and food science. But NotCo’s take on foodtech is more akin to Beyond Meat’s than Impossible Foods or Perfect Day.

The company isn’t making biologically engineered foods, it’s taking its taxonomy of existing foods and determining which combinations of plant ingredients will most closely mimic all aspects of the animal products they’re replacing.

So a closer analogy would be companies like Just or the newly funded Climax Foods. Muchnick said that the difference is in where these companies are spending their time. Instead of focusing on a protein that can act as a one for one replacement for casein or the carbohydrate lactose, NotCo is trying to replicate the whole product — the entire sensorial panel of a particular food.

“Flavors, taste, smell, color, and the interaction between all of them and the molecular components in food,” said Muchnick. “It’s not just the concept of how limited we are to replicating products and how limited to using AI to address other challenges in the food industry.”

For Muchnick, the biggest opportunity for NotCo is dairy. While the company has plans to introduce a number of new products including a chicken replacement to compliment its line of NotBurger and NotMeat products, it’s really the dairy business where the company wants to land and expand.

It’s looking to cut a deal with a large quick service restaurant along with deals for an online channel and a direct to consumer play.

As it grows, consumers can expect to see the company’s brands recede into the background as Muchnick looks to focus on supplying products to other vendors.

“We partnered upstream and downstream,” Muchnick said. The company works with suppliers including Ingredion, ADM, and Cargill and downstream has product partners who will incorporate its milk substitute into other products.

“What we want is to be the catalyst of change with many other companies. Why don’t we become the enabler. We’re becoming the Intel inside of other products.”

At that scale, the company would be a prime candidate for public investors, and if Muchnick has his way the company will get there. “We are aiming to have a $300 million company by 2024 with 70 percent of that business in the US,” he said. 

Yubico, a maker of hardware security keys, has unveiled its newest YubiKey 5C NFC, which the company says offers the strongest defenses against some of the most common cyberattacks.

Security keys provide a physical security barrier to your online accounts. Hackers can steal usernames and passwords, and two-factor authentication codes sent to your phone spoofed or bypassed. But plugging in a physical security key to your computer or phone tells the online service that it’s really you logging in to your account.

In the age of working from home, security keys make it practically impossible for hackers on the other side of the world to break into your accounts.

Yubico’s latest YubiKey 5C NFC is the latest iteration of the company’s lineup of security keys, which comes with a dedicated USB-C connector that works across different computers and phones. And for devices that don’t, it also comes with an in-built NFC chip allowing users to wirelessly tap their key against their device to log in.

YubiKeys pack in a ton of open security and authentication standards, making it work on the “majority” of computers and phones — including Macs, iPhones, Linux machines, and Windows and Android devices, said Guido Appenzeller, Yubico’s chief product officer.

Its keys also work with many enterprise apps, as well as consumer services like Facebook, Google, Microsoft, and Twitter.

Yubico priced its newest YubiKey at $55.

Swyg, a Dublin-based startup that believes it can reduce bias in recruitment by combining a peer-interview process with its own AI, has picked up $1.2 million in pre-seed funding.

Leading the round is Frontline Ventures, alongside angel investors including Charles Bibby (co-founder of Pointy) and Martin Henk (co-founder of Pipedrive). The funding will be used to grow Swyg’s technical and product team, and to further develop its platform.

“Candidate selection is a big problem in hiring,” Swyg founder Vincent Lonij tells me. “It is the most labor intensive and most error-prone part of the process… Bad decisions are made when a single reviewer/interviewer tries to make a decision based on limited information such as a resume or static profile. This scenario is exactly where human bias enters into the process”.

In addition, on the applicant side, Lonij notes that the overwhelming majority of job candidates want to receive feedback from their time-consuming job interviews, “yet only 41% receive it, hindering their ability to learn and grow”.

To solve this, the Swyg platform puts candidates through an interview process that sees them interview each other through a series of one-to-one video chats using pre-defined structured questions.

“The peer-to-peer process draws on the expertise of a diverse group of individuals instead of relying on a single recruiter or hiring manager,” explains the Swyg founder. “Simply getting input from more diverse reviewers already reduces bias”. In addition, Swyg’s AI technology claims to be able to calibrate peer-interviewers in real-time “to detect and correct bias and human error”.

One way to think about it is that to understand the interviewee and how they performed in the interview, first Swyg needs to understand more about the interviewer. This could include taking into account how they score candidates in aggregate (i.e. are they more positive or more negative in their scores) and other variables such as if they are inclined to be a tougher judge following a high score and vice versa or if they remain fairly consistent.

There are also systems in place to detect when something unexpected happens, including participants deliberately giving unfair ratings. This triggers a review process where Swyg can exclude certain reviews if it is warranted.

“In a nutshell, we use machine learning to understand the interviewers that in turn understand the interviewees, as opposed to trying to judge candidates directly with AI/ML,” explains Lonij. “We’re able to use this technology to detect and correct for known cognitive biases of the interviewers which leads to more accurate assessments”.

Meanwhile, Lonij says that everyone else is trying to solve the candidate selection problem using fully automated solutions or fully manual solutions. “Neither of these will work,” he argues.

That’s because AI in general is not developed enough to be able to judge humans in a fully automated way, resulting in CV keyword matching or automated analysis of recorded videos being extremely unreliable. In turn, human interviewers alone are error prone and subject to a range of biases.

“We are different because of our hybrid approach,” adds Lonij. “By making candidates part of the process we can take advantage of the best parts of human integrity and adaptability while also getting the efficiency of AI”.

For China’s food delivery workers, life can feel like a constant battle with algorithms, traffic police, and disgruntled customers.

An essay detailing the hazardous work conditions of China’s food delivery drivers went viral on the internet on Tuesday, causing a moment of national reckonings on algorithmic harms to people.

In China’s populated urban hubs, one won’t miss the army of express couriers speeding and honking on their scooters. Their reckless driving, according to the investigative report from China’s People magazine, is largely a result of stringent algorithms that penalize late delivery; what’s more, the machines fail to fully factor in real-life variables like weather and traffic and often put drivers’ lives at risk. Within hours, the story had gained over 100,000 views and was shared widely and discussed on the WeChat messenger.

While food delivery platforms boast increasingly fast delivery thanks to state-of-the-art machine learning, the lofty goals the algorithms set for drivers are often attainable only by breaking traffic rules and working extended hours. Sitting indoors, customers tap on streamlined apps, detached from the dangerous delivery journey. To avoid bad reviews and wage cuts, drivers dash and honk pedestrians out of their way to be on time.

Within the first six months of 2019, Shanghai recorded 325 injuries and deaths involving food and parcel delivery drivers alone, with Alibaba’s Ele.me and Tencent-backed Meituan, the food delivery leaders, accounting for nearly 70% of the accidents.

On the flip side is an enormous market opportunity. The food ordering industry in China is estimated to reach 665 billion yuan ($97 billion) by 2020. A total of 398 million or nearly 45% of China’s internet users ordered food online as of March. In contrast, online delivery penetration in the U.S. will reach about 9% by 2020.

Millions of drivers are powering China’s food delivery economy, with nearly 4 million on Meituan by 2019 and 3 million on Ele.me at last count.

This isn’t the first time that China has come to grips with safety for food delivery drivers. Following a series of road accidents in 2017, Chinese police ordered on-demand platforms to improve safety standards for drivers. A commentary from China’s state newspaper at the time called for “more humane” management for take-out couriers.

Alibaba has taken notice of the latest critique. About 12 hours after the article published, Ele.me announced it will add a feature that allows customers to voluntarily extend wait time by five or 10 minutes. It also promised that the platform won’t penalize couriers with good credit and service history even when they are occasionally late. Meituan, Ele.me’s main rival, has yet to respond to the issues brought up by the widely circulated article.

Dawn Capital, the London-based VC that focuses on B2B software, has closed its fourth and largest fund: $400 million that it plans to use to continue investing in early stage startups. Oversubscribed and closed (all remotely) within six months of launching in the midst of a global health pandemic, the news underscores how VCs — and their investors — continue to see opportunity in the region, despite the many uncertainties that hang over us right now.

“European founders are doing really well, with lots of good stories in our portfolio already, and they’re just getting better,” said Haakon Overli, Dawn’s co-founder and a general partner, in an interview.

Overli believes we’re in the beginning of a big wave in Europe, where we will see not just more promising B2B startups emerge, but more of them scale within Europe rather than decamp to the US, or sell early to a bigger rival.

Dawn’s focus is currently on four main areas: data and analytics, security, fintech and “the future of work” — all categories that have seen a significant fillip in recent months as companies are forced to rethink how they operate — with significantly more employees working remotely — and are investing in updated systems to do so. Dawn estimates that the B2B software market in Europe is currently worth some $1 trillion.

To date, Dawn has invested in some 40 companies, and some of the notable names in its portfolio include data analytics startup Collibra, IZettle (which was acquired by PayPal) and machine learning company Dataiku. Last year, it closed a $125 million “opportunities” fund to make growth-stage, later investments but this current fund will bring it back to focus on smaller investments of between $5 million and $20 million. Considering that this a $400 million fund, that likely means a sizeable volume of startups entering Dawn’s portfolio, setting the VC up to remain a steady and strong player in Europe for years to come.

“Innovation thrives on instability. System-wide shocks drive change that startups can exploit ruthlessly, while incumbents are incapable of adjusting,” said Dawn cofounder and GP Norman Fiore, in a statement. “Historically, these shocks were either financial, technological or societal. In 2020, we’ve had all three at once: technology shock as the cloud came into its own, financial shock which will force society to do more with less, and a fundamental change to the way our working society is organised. We can’t wait to see where our entrepreneurs take us as we invest Dawn IV and greatly appreciate the support of all our investors in making this a successful fundraise.”

Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s retail venture Reliance Retail said on Wednesday it will raise $1.02 billion from Silver Lake, kickstarting a fundraising spree months after its sister venture Jio Platforms raised $20 billion.

The investment from Silver Lake values Reliance Retail, the largest retail chain in India, at $57 billion, they said. Silver Lake will acquire 1.75% equity stake in Reliance Retail.

“I am delighted to extend our relationship with Silver Lake to our transformational efforts of building an inclusive partnership with millions of small merchants while providing value to Indian consumers across the country in the Indian retail sector. We believe technology will be key to bringing the much-needed transformation in this sector so that various constituents of the retail ecosystem can collaborate to build inclusive growth platforms. Silver Lake will be an invaluable partner in implementing our vision for Indian Retail,” said Ambani in a statement.

Menlo Park-headquartered firm Silver Lake also invested $1.3 billion in Jio Platforms earlier this year. Earlier this week, it led a $500 million investment round in edtech giant Byju’s.