Year: 2020

Global satellite operator Intelsat has voluntarily filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, the company announced late on Wednesday. Intelsat has attempted to position this as a positive moment that sees it embark on a “financial restructuring” project to enable its future growth, but a bankruptcy filing is seldom cause for celebration.

The company cites a need to participate in the FCC’s C-band spectrum clearing for 5G network built out in the U.S. as one of the factors behind its decisions to file, as well as “managing the economic slowdown impacting server of its markets caused by the COVID-19 global health crisis.”

Intelsat notes that its current plan involves no changes to the day-to-day operation of the company, or any reduction in headcount. The company also said that it has secured $1 billion in committed new financing, which will come in the form of debtor-in-position funds, subject to court approval. That just describes any company that plans to continue to operate its business while also undergoing Chapter 11 bankruptcy proceedings.

The company also says it’ll be continuing to launch new satellites, building out its ground network, and adding new services as it continues the process, and that its goal is to to get through the restructuring process “as quickly as possible.” The satellite operator cites GM and American Airlines as models that show is goal with the filing, having also undertaken a similar restructuring in the past and emerged with greater fiscal viability.

Intelsat’s bankruptcy filing isn’t the first noteworthy space co. filing resulting from the global pandemic: Would-be global satellite internet provider OneWeb filed for Chapter 11 protection in March.

San Mateo-based startup Xona Space Systems has raised a $1 million “pre-seed” round led by 1517, and including participation from Seraphim Capital, Trucks Venture Capital and Stellar Solutions. The company is focused on developing a Positioning, Navigation and Timing (PNT) satellite service that it believes can supersede Global Navigation Satellite Systems (GNSS), providing big benefits in terms of security, precision and accuracy.

Xona contends that GNSS, which is essentially the backbone of almost all global navigation software and services, is relatively imprecise, and open to potential disruption from malicious attackers. It’s a technology that was transformational in its time, but it’s not up to the challenge of meeting the requirements of modern applications, including autonomous vehicle transportation, drone fleets, automated ocean shipping and more.

The company is pursuing an ambitious goal: GNSS remains one of the most significant, broad and impactful space-based technologies ever to be developed. Its impact is apparent daily, from consumer applications like turn-by-turn navigation via mobile mapping apps, to industrial services like global logistics platforms. Anyone who can develop a credible next-generation alternative that modernizes and improves upon GNSS stands to gain a lot.

Xona’s approach promises tenfold improvements in terms of accuracy vs. GNSS, and encryption that can help provide much more security. The company has a patent pending on its ‘Pular’ branded PNT service, which will employ low Earth orbit satellites (vs. higher orbit current GNSS networks) to provide its next-gen navigation tech.

Porsche Cars North America has launched a new online platform called Porsche Finder that lets customers search for used vehicles across its dealership network, the latest step by the automaker to create an online marketplace.

The new platform, which was developed by the automaker’s Porsche Digital subsidiary and PCNA, enables customers to search by vehicle model and generation and includes additional filters for price, equipment and packages as well as interior and exterior vehicle colors.

For now, customers can only search for pre-owned and Certified Pre-Owned vehicles using the new Porsche Finder tool. Once users find that 911 GT2 RS, Panamera Turbo Sport Turismo, Macan crossover or all-electric Taycan they’re looking for, they are directed to contact the specific Porsche dealership.

Porsche Cars North America has a bigger aim than just creating a nationwide search feature. Porsche Finder is part of a broader strategy to create a one-stop online shop where customers can complete the entire process of finding, buying and financing a vehicle, PCNA CEO Klaus Zellmer said in a recent interview.

“We want to have a seamless e-commerce ecosystem for everything Porsche — that’s the long term vision,” Zellmer said, adding that this will eventually include the ability for customers to trade in their vehicle, complete the financing, insurance and final web signature.

The company has already made some headway. In October, Porsche starting selling new and used vehicles online in the U.S. through a pilot program that initially involved 26 of the 192 dealerships in the country. Since the COVID-19 pandemic, dealerships have jumped at the chance to be included. One third of Porsche dealerships in the U.S. will be a part of digital pilot program by June, according to Zellmer.

For Tesla owners, which has only conducted direct online sales and doesn’t have a dealership network, the prospect of creating a digital marketplace to buy a vehicle might seem obvious and even quaint. But for Porsche customers, visiting a showroom and getting behind the wheel of a 911 or Cayenne is a long-standing part of the buying experience.

Porsche Digital was working on this search platform before COVID-19 swept across the globe, upending industries and changing the way consumers shopped. The pandemic has confirmed Porsche’s move towards e-commerce, Zellmer said.

“It just underlines how important this digital direction is for our business,” Zellmer said “Even though we pride ourselves to be a brand that is all about the visceral experience, we  also have to respect our customers wishes who want to look for a Porsche — and pick from the whole variety in the United States — from their iPad.”

Last December, when CRM startup Kustomer was announcing its latest round of funding — a $60 million round led by Coatue — its co-founder and CEO Brad Birnbaum said it would use some of the money to build more RPA-style automations into its platform to expand KustomerIQ, its AI-based product that helps understand and respond to customer enquiries to take some of the more repetitive load off of agents. Today, Kustomer is announcing some M&A that will help in that strategy: it is acquiring Reply.ai, a startup originally founded in Madrid that has built a code-free platform for companies to create customised chatbots to handle customer service enquires that use machine learning to, over time, become better at responding to those inbound contacts.

Kustomer, which has raised more than $170 million and is now valued at $710 million (per PitchBook), said it is not disclosing the financial terms of the deal.

Reply.ai — whose customers include Coca Cola, Starbucks, Samsung, and a number of retailers and major ad and marketing agencies working on behalf of clients — had by comparison raised a modest $4 million in funding (with the last round back in 2018). Its list of investors included strategic backers like Aflac and Westfield (the shopping mall giant), as well as Seedcamp, Madrid’s JME Ventures, and Y Combinator, where Reply.ai was a part of its Startup School cohort in 2017.

Birnbaum said that the conversation for acquiring Reply.ai started before the global health pandemic — the two already worked together, as part of Reply.ai’s integrations with a number of CRM platforms. But active discussions, due diligence, and the closing of the deal were all done over Zoom. “We were fortunate that we got to meet before Corona, but for the most part we did this remotely,” he said.

Reply.ai was founded back in 2016 — the year when chatbots suddenly became all the rage — and it managed to make it through that and then the subsequent the trough of disillusionment, when a lot of the early novelty wore off after they were discovered to be not quite as effective as many had hoped or assumed they would be. One of the reasons for Reply.ai’s survival was that it had proven to be a builder of effective applications in one of the only segments of the market became a willing customer and user of chatbots: customer service.

While a large part of the CRM industry — estimated to be worth some $40 billion in 2019 —  is still based around human interactions, there has been a growing push to leverage advances in AI, cloud services, and use of the Internet as a point of interaction to bring more automation into the process, both to help those who are agents deal with more tricky issues, and to help bring overall costs down for those who rely on customer support as part of their service proposition.

That trend, if anything, is only getting a boost right now. In some cases, agents are unable to work because of social distancing rules in cases where customer queries cannot be handled by remote workers. In others, companies are seeing a lot of financial pressure and are looking to reduce expenses. But at the same time, with more people at home and unable to my physical queries to stores and more, the whole medium of customer support is seeing new levels of usage.

Kustomer has been taking on the bigger names in CRM, including Salesforce (where Birnbaum and his cofounder Jeremy Suriel previously worked), Zendesk and Oracle, by providing a platform that makes it easier for human agents to handle inbound “omni-channel” customer requests — another big trend, leveraging the rise of multiple messaging and communications platforms as potential routes to both speaking to customers and seeing them complain for all the world to see. So moving deeper into chatbots and other AI-powered tools is a natural progression.

Birnbaum said that one of its key interests with Reply.ai was its focus on “deflection” — the term for using non-human tools and services to help resolve inbound requests before needing to call in a human agent. Reply.ai’s tools have been shown to help deflect 40% of initial inbound queries, he noted.

“Some companies have been dealing with a significant increase in inbound volume, and it’s been hard to scale their teams of agents, especially when they are remote,” he said. “So those companies are looking for ways to respond more rapidly. So anything they can do to help with that deflection and let their agents be more productive to drive higher levels of satisfaction, anything that can enable self service, is what this is about.”

Other tools in the Reply toolkit, in addition to its chatbot-building platform and deflection capabilities, include agent assistant tools for suggesting relevant answers, as well as suggestions for tagging (for analytics) and re-routing.

“We are excited for Reply to join Kustomer and share its mission to make customer service more efficient, effective and personalized,” said said Omar Pera, one of Reply.ai’s founders, in a statement. “As a long-time partner of Kustomer, we are able to seamlessly integrate our deflection and chatbots technologies into Kustomer’s platform and help brands more cost-effectively increase efficiency. We look forward to working with Brad and the entire team.”

Facebook, and a group of telecom companies including China Mobile International, MTN GlobalConnect, Orange, and Vodafone are collaborating to build the “most comprehensive” subsea cable to serve the African continent and Middle East region where nearly a billion people are still not connected to the internet.

The project, called 2Africa, will see the companies lay cables that will stretch to 37,000km (22,990 miles) and interconnect Europe (eastward via Egypt), the Middle East (via Saudi Arabia), and 21 landings in 16 countries in Africa.

In a joint statement, the companies said they expect the system to be live by 2023 or early 2024. Once live, it should be able to deliver more than the total combined capacity of all subsea cables serving Africa today, with a design capacity of up to 180Tbps on key parts of the system.

The companies, which also includes Saudi Arabia-based telecom firm STC, Telecom Egypt, and African telecom firm WIOCC, say service providers in the countries where 2Africa cable lands will obtain capacity in carrier-neutral data centres or open-access cable landing stations on a fair and equitable basis.

Facebook and telecom operators did not reveal how much money they were investing on the project.

Najam Ahmad, Vice President of Network Infrastructure at Facebook, said 2Africa is “a major element of our ongoing investment in Africa to bring more people online to a faster internet. We’ve seen first-hand the positive impact that increased connectivity has on communities, from education to healthcare.”

The subsea cable would also help Facebook and others drive down their bandwidth costs.

The internet is an amalgamation of tiny bits of code that move around the world in cables across the ocean floor. As of early last year, 750,000 miles of cable have been laid out across the globe.

The involvement of Facebook, which maintains a number of other connectivity efforts to bring more people online, in 2Africa shouldn’t come as a surprise. Telecom firms have long worked on undersea cable projects, but over the past decade, several American technology companies have joined the effort.

Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and Amazon now own or lease nearly half of the undersea bandwidth, according to Washington-based research firm TeleGeography. Google alone has backed at least 14 cables globally.

Last year, the search giant unveiled Equiano, a privately-funded subsea cable to connect Europe and Africa. The first phase of this project was scheduled for completion in 2021. Both 2Africa and Equiano have commissioned Alcatel Submarine Networks for building the cable.

American technology companies aren’t alone in their fascination with laying cables across the globe. China’s Huawei completed a 3,750mile cable between Brazil and Cameroon in late 2018, and last year began work on a 7,500-mile cable connecting Europe, Asia and Africa. It was also finishing up links across the Gulf of California in Mexico, WSJ reported last year, adding that some unnamed current and former U.S. officials were worried that the Chinese tech giant’s cables were vulnerable to espionage. Huawei denied any threat.

GoodWork, a Philippines-based booking platform for home services, has raised a $1.6 million seed round it will use to expand into new Southeast Asian markets.

The funding was led by Chaac Ventures, a firm that backs Princeton alumni (GoodWork co-founder and CEO Andrew Koger earned his bachelor of arts at the university), and includes participation from Elysium Ventures, Kairos K50 and angel investors from Facebook and Snapchat.

Before founding GoodWork, Koger lead Fulfillment by Lazada, the e-commerce company’s logistics arm. He told TechCrunch that GoodWork will focus on launching in more major cities, and plans to expand into Vietnam and Thailand at the end of this year or early 2021.

Founded in 2018, GoodWork currently operates in the Metro Manila region. Its app lets customers book services including home cleaning, laundry pickup, air conditioner cleaning and home repairs, as well as spa services like manicures. Service providers on the platform, who set their own prices, typically get more than 10,000 jobs each month, with 70% daily bookings from repeat customers.

In March and April, GoodWork followed government rulings to suspend operations, after regions throughout the Philippines were put under different levels of community quarantine in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, with Metro Manila under the strictest restrictions. To adapt, the company added new health services, including online medical consultations, to its app.

Now as lockdown measures gradually lift, the company is preparing by adding disinfection cleaning services and implementing new safety guidance for providers, including a body temperature monitoring feature in its app, and additional safety training and protective equipment for cleaners.

Over the last three weeks, Kroger said the startup has already started seeing a strong recovery, with some categories already returning to pre-COVID levels.

“The drivers differ by category, but in general I’m very optimistic that home service demand will actually get a good tailwind in the months ahead,” he added. “For instance, with continued work from home policies, this increases air-conditioning usage, which has led to an increased demand for servicing, and for many people it has increased the need for home cleaning.”

He added there is also more interest in laundry pickup and delivery services, because many people don’t have washing machines at home and rely on laundromats. Beauty services like manicures and pedicures are still not allowed to operate in Manila, but Kroger believes that once they start again, there will be increased demand for them to be performed at home since many people may continue avoiding crowded shopping areas.

African startups have another $100 million in VC to pitch for after Novastar Ventures’ latest raise.

The Nairobi and Lagos based investment group announced it has closed $108 million in new commitments to launch its Africa Fund II, which brings Novastar’s total capital to $200 million.

With the additional resources, the firm plans to make 12 to 14 investments across the continent, according to Managing Director Steve Beck. He spoke to TechCrunch on Novastar Ventures’ plans for the new fund.

A notable update to Novastar’s VC focus is geographic scope. The firm was originally co-founded in Kenya by Beck and British investor Andrew Carruthers and built its first portfolio largely around companies based in East Africa. Novastar Ventures made 15 investments with its first fund, including companies such as Uganda and Kenya focused energy startup SolarNow and agtech venture M-Farm.

“The second fund is basically the same strategy as the first, but…the biggest difference is that we opened up a second front in West Africa — more particularly to be in and around the entrepreneurial system in Lagos,” Beck told TechCrunch on a call.

Before closing its Africa Fund II, Novastar Ventures had already made several investments in West Africa, including leading a round in Nigerian on demand motorcycle transit startup Max.ng and backing Ghanaian health company, MPharma. Novastar opened an office Lagos in 2019.

On the types of startups Novastar will target with its new fund, the focus is more on mission than industry silos, according to co-founder Steve Beck. “We’re sector agnostic. I would describe us more as a segment fund than a sector fund,” he said.

“We really try to look for businesses called breakthrough businesses, [those] that are addressing the biggest problems in the largest markets.”

That has led Novastar Ventures to invest in digital companies in education, information access, agtech, mobility and off-grid energy.

“Essentially what we’re doing is looking for those businesses that are addressing the basic needs, basic goods and services across the true mass markets of the continent,” said Beck.

On whether the firm is a dedicated impact fund, Beck said, “The way we characterize ourselves is we’re a commercial venture fund with an impact screen.”

On investment amounts and types, Novastar Ventures is fairly flexible on ticket size, from seed to later stage.

“We’re gonna…have some portfolio companies where we put to work a million dollars or less or were going to have some where we put $8 or $9 million dollars in through capital rounds. That’s…the deployment strategy,” Beck said.

Novastar Ventures works closely with its portfolio companies, according to its co-founder.

“We’re very active investors and always take a board seat to be close to the entrepreneurs. We often are the first institutional investor that they have.”

Startups who want to pitch to the company can reach out to the fund’s founders and directors via the website or LinkedIn, according to Beck. He added that Novastar Ventures is recruiting to add another member to its investor team in 2020.

The firm’s latest raise and $200 million capital amount creates another high value fund focused on African startups.

On the high end of estimates, the continent’s tech ecosystem reached $2 billion in VC to startups in 2019, compared to less than half a billion dollar five years ago.

Other large Africa focused VC shops include TLcom Capital — which closed a $71 million fund in February —  and Partech, which doubled its Africa fund to $143 million in 2019. The venture arms of major global companies have also become more active in African tech recently, including that of Goldman Sachs and Visa.

Workvivo, an employee communications platform founded only three years ago, has raised $16 million in a Series A funding, in a round led by Tiger Global which is best know for large growth-oriented rounds.

Also participating is Frontline Ventures and Enterprise Ireland, previous investors. The Series A round follows on from a seed round late last year, bringing its total funding to just over $17.5 million.

In the last couple of months it’s become quite obvious to millions of people during the COVID-19 pandemic that working remotely online was going to figure in their future. So companies that have products which makes that transition easier have skyrocketed in value, even if this was probably an overall long-term trend. But how to reproduce that elusive “company culture” online? That is much harder.

Solutions like Jive or Facebook Workplace have come along, but Workvivo has taken a different approach to creating an internal communications platform designed to engage and connect with employees.

Founded in Cork, Ireland, the platform is known for creating a sense of community and belonging to the organization, the kind of which you might get from a highly engaged Facebook group that you were a fan of. Through web, desktop and a mobile app, Workvivo allows employees to read and post content to an activity feed, as well as ‘like’, share and comment in the same way they might on Facebook. It’s in the same ecosystem as Slack, but where Slack doesn’t do “culture” so well. NETGEAR, TELUS International and Cubic Telecom are among the many companies now using it.

The Cork-based company, founded by John Goulding and Joe Lennon, bootstrapped from the start. Goulding said in a statement: “The move to remote working has been significantly accelerated by recent events. It’s now more important than ever that employees are able to effectively communicate and remain engaged with each other and with the business. Workvivo’s communication platform helps organizations connect and engage with their employees regardless of location, bringing the culture alive and aligning everybody with what the organization is trying to achieve.”

He said the funding will be used largely for sales and marketing as well as product development. This is typical of growth-funding rounds such as this.

In an interview with TechCrunch, he denied the funding was precipitated by the global pandemic, but more by the longer-term trend of remote working.

In a sign that this is almost certainly the case, remote-working advocate Eric Yuan, founder of Zoom, previously invested last year.

Gallup estimates 70% of employees globally are “disengaged” at work and this costs the worldwide economy $450 billion annually. And who can blame them when their company “intranets” are usually so dull.

Dathena, a Singapore-based company that provides AI-based data protection and privacy solutions, announced it has raised a $12 million Series A. Part of the funding will be used to expand Dathena’s co-sell partnership with Microsoft in the United States, which is targeted to Azure Cloud and Microsoft 365 customers who need to comply with new data privacy regulations like the California Consumer Privacy Act.

The funding was led by Jungle Ventures, with participation from Caphorn and SEEDS Capital, the investment arm of Enterprise Singapore, a government agency that supports entrepreneurs. Existing investors Cerracap Ventures and MS&AD Ventures also returned for this round. This brings Dathena’s total raised to $18 million.

Founded in 2016, Dathena says it currently has more than 200,000 users and enterprise clients. Its software scans and organizes data stored on premise or in the cloud, identifies sensitive information, and then monitors access and potential security risks.

Dathena also automates compliance with data protection regulations around the world, like the European Union’s GDPR and California’s CCPA, which is useful for clients who have operations in different countries or are in highly-regulated industries like healthcare, finance or defense.

Dathena CEO and co-founder Christopher Muffat told TechCrunch that the new funding will also be used to grow the company’s R&D efforts to build a self-service and plug-and-play platform, and hire more sales, marketing and customer support staff for users in North America and Europe. The company recently opened its U.S. headquarters in New York City.

Muffat identified Dathena’s main competitors as DocAuthority, MinerEye and Exonar, which also organize and protect enterprise data. Dathena strives to differentiate by being data-source agnostic, so any ETL (extract, transform, load) tools can be plugged into its platform, allowing data sets from almost any source to be imported. It is also deeply-integrated into Microsoft software, including Microsoft 365 E3 and E5, Azure Information Protection and Microsoft Cloud App Security.

Muffat added that Dathena is also simple to use, while its AI-based software makes data security tasks more time efficient and scalable.

“Most data privacy tools are made for IT folks and are too complex to navigate for other members of an organization, yet managing compliance with regulations such as GDPR and CCPA often falls under the purview of legal or other non-IT business functions,” he said.

As people continue working remotely because of the COVID-19 pandemic, Muffat says this creates new vulnerabilities, including access to corporate systems over mobile or home computers that their employers may not have full control of; less visibility over where company data flows, making it harder to protect; and workers potentially using unsecured Wi-Fi networks or accessing their email through web portals instead of desktop apps.

Remote employees may also use their Office 365 or Gmail credentials to access cloud apps, increasing the risk of breeches.

To address that, Dathena has been focusing on Microsoft customers and cloud deployment, and now provides managed services to operate the Dathena platform, helping clients get more use out of the product.

In a press statement, Jungle Ventures Amit Anand founding partners said, “Dathena’s global growth positions the tech leader to capitalize on the rapid evolution of the $120 billion data protection market. It’s a shining example of our investment in global tech companies emerging out of Asia and we’re excited to continue to support their rapid growth.”

As the U.S. waits for the great reopening of its hallowed national pastimes in an era of pandemic-enforced social distancing, sports teams are increasingly turning to a new wave of digital tools like social media and video games to connect with a new generation of fans.

The Los Angeles Rams are the latest team to embrace the trend, choosing to work with social media giant Snap and EA Sports’ Madden NFL franchise to unveil the new design of their uniforms ahead of the opening of the most high tech stadium in the National Football League later this year.

The team is working with Los Angeles’ own Snap to unveil the uniforms in a custom-created Snapchat augmented reality Lens, featuring the ability to trigger players into action.

The revelation of the uniform in augmented reality, a decision brought about by social distancing measures put in place in California, is a first for any NFL team. The Rams franchise also collaborated with the Madden franchise to provide a sneak peak of the uniform through in-game renders of Rams players showing off the new look.

On Instagram, social media users can see interactive content of the uniforms in their new natural haaitat before the stadium opens.

“We had been chatting about how to use AR for a while. Just across the board,” said Lexi Vonderlieth, the head of partnership marketing. “We were trying to figure out ways to bring the uniform to life and showcase that a bit and create something that was a bit engaging.”

From the world lens through Snap, viewers can see Jared Goff or Aaron Donald in their apartments, living rooms, or. back yards. Through the selfie view Snap users can put. on the new jersey and the Rams helmet.

The Los Angeles-based Snap has had a longtime relationship with the Rams. In part through proximity and in part through connections in the Los Angeles business world.

The unveiling of the uniforms, which happened earlier today, marked the first time that Snap had worked with a franchise instead of with the National Football League broadly.

Earlier uses of the Snap filters and camera this season came during the NFL draft itself — where Snap rolled out special cams as a way for fans to celebrate and represent their own teams.

The National Football League actually plays a prominent roll in the history of Snap lenses. The famous “Gatorade dump” tradition where the coach from the winning team in the Super Bowl gets doused with Gatorade by his players was one of the first lenses that Snap developed.

“We saw this incredible connection in how AR could engage,” said Snap senior director of global creative strategy, Jeff Miller. “Snap is a platform that is built for connecting with close friends and family. Sports passion is expressed through those kinds of connections.”

Snap, in some senses, is uniquely positioned to amplify the fan experience in a socially distanced sporting world. “[The technology] gives us an ability to create amazing experiences that can replace a physical activation, enhance it, or give alternatives in a sport-from-home environment.”