Month: March 2021

Byju’s is eying acquisition of a startup that could help the biggest e-learning Indian firm deepen its footprint in the U.S.

The Indian startup is in talks to acquire online reading platform Epic, a startup that offers unlimited access to over 40,000 books, videos, and quizzes from more than 250 publishers to kids aged 12 or younger, two people familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

The deal values Epic at “significantly” over $300 million dollars, according to one person, who like the other requested anonymity as the matter is private. The terms of the deal may change and/or the acquisition may not materialize, people warned.

An Epic spokesperson declined to comment Monday evening, and Byju’s did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday.

Epic, backed by Evolution Media, reaches over 50 million kids in the U.S., a figure that has ballooned from 20 million last year.

The California-based startup, which has raised over $51 million to date, claimed in a press release last year that over 1 million teachers across more than 90% of U.S. elementary schools use Epic.

On Epic, founded by Suren Markosian and Kevin Donahue, children read over a billion books last year. The firm now plans to release several print versions of its original titles at Walmart, Target, and Sam’s Club later this year.

Some original titles released by Epic

Epic collects and analyzes real-time anonymized and aggregated data on how many children read a book, how deeply they engage with it, and where their interests start to fall off.

If the deal goes through, the startup’s offerings would align with Byju’s current playbook in the U.S. In 2019, the Indian startup acquired U.S.-based Osmo, which offers “blended learning” apps to integrate offline activities for kids aged between five to 12.

Byju’s is separately in the middle of concluding a new funding round whose size is expected to balloon over $600 million, TechCrunch reported last week. The new round is expected to value Byju’s at $15 billion.

The new financing round, a major tranche of which has already concluded (about $460 million at $13 billion valuation, per a filing), will be used to finance the new acquisition, the source said.

The Indian giant, which prepares students pursuing undergraduate and graduate-level courses, has witnessed skyrocketing growth amid the pandemic after New Delhi issued a months-long lockdown and closed schools.

India’s second most valuable startup, which serves over 80 million users, has additionally been aggressively exploring ways to grow inorganically.

Byju’s, which acquired coding platform aimed at kids WhiteHat Jr for $300 million last year, is conducting due diligence to acquire decades-old Indian brick-and-mortar institute Aakash and Toppr, another online learning startup in the world’s second largest internet market. These two deals are being financed with the over $1 billion funds Byju’s raised last year, one person familiar with the matter said.

WhiteHat Jr, which sparked controversy last year when it sued two critics, currently generates nearly half of its revenue from the U.S.

MessageBird, the omnichannel cloud communications platform recently valued at $3 billion, is continuing to ramp up its M&A activity. Following last year’s acquisition of Pusher, a company that provides real-time web technologies, it is announcing that it has acquired “video-first” customer engagement platform 24sessions, and customer data platform Hull.

Terms of the two new deals aren’t being disclosed, although MessageBird founder and CEO Robert Vis tells me the three acquisitions add up to about $100 million in total, and we alreadly know that Pusher’s acquisition price was $35 million. I also understand that the 24sessions and Hull acquisitions saw both companies’ investors exit entirely.

Originally seen as a European or “rest of the world” competitor to U.S.-based Twilio — offering a cloud communications platform that supports voice, video and text capabilities all wrapped up in an API — MessageBird has since repositioned itself as an “Omnichannel Platform-as-a-Service” (OPaaS). The idea is to easily enable enterprises and medium and smaller-sized companies to communicate with customers on any channel of their choosing.

Out of the box, this includes support for WhatsApp, Messenger, WeChat, Twitter, Line, Telegram, SMS, email and voice. Customers can start online and then move their support request or query over to a more convenient channel, such as their favourite mobile messaging app, which, of course, can go with them. It’s all part of MessageBird Vis’ big bet that the future of customer interactions is omni-channel.

To that end, the acquisition of 24sessions adds another channel: video. This, Vis tells me, is a particularly important channel where in-person interactions are being replicated digitally. However, he says it’s not just enough to have a video option — you need one that is compliant and secure. This is especially true for regulated industries such as financial services and healthcare. In addition, 24sessions is web-based, meaning that end-users aren’t required to install an app.

“Bringing a safe, secure and customizable video platform into the MessageBird family is the next step in our strategic journey,” said Vis in a statement. “Our portfolio of owned services already includes SMS, voice, email, OTT, social, live chat and push. The addition of 24sessions’ video platform gives us one of the world’s most comprehensive and powerful omnichannel offerings, and is consistent with our having end-to-end control of the stack in order to create magical experiences for our customers”.

“By joining forces with MessageBird, we’re making a leap forward in our mission to improve personal customer contact and turn it into a smooth digital experience, without losing the human touch,” adds Rutger Teunissen, CEO of 24sessions. “Video has become a more embedded, instant, intelligent, and integrated part of the omnichannel customer experience”.

However, communicating with customers more efficiently doesn’t just mean interacting with them on the channels of their choosing and building backend workflows to support this, it also requires a better understanding of the customer and the context of their query. That’s where the acquisition of Hull, based in France and the U.S., comes into play.

Described as a customer data platform (CDP), Hull’s team and technology will be deployed to create an “in-depth analytics layer” between MessageBird’s omnichannel offering and the workflow solutions it provides to customers.

“We want to empower clients to have easy, frictionless conversations with customers, so it’s crucial that we understand where those customers are and how they like to communicate,” said Vis. “To do that, it’s crucial that our platform is able to collect, unify and enrich product, marketing, and sales data and synchronize it across the workflow.”

In total, 45 staff will join from 24sessions, and 14 will join from Hull. The combined M&A brings MessageBird’s total headcount to almost 500 people across its nine hubs globally.

User guides, knowledge articles and community discussions form a detailed, yet very fragmented, landscape of information about a company and its products. Today, a company that’s built a platform both to organize that data, and help those who need it to tap into it more effectively, is announcing a round of funding that underscores the demand it’s seeing in the market for its technology.

Zoomin, an Israeli startup that uses machine learning, natural language processing and some big data magic to help companies build self-service experiences that bring together information and answers pulled from all of the content that’s being generated by customers and the company itself across various channels, has picked up $52 million in a Series C led by General Atlantic, with previous backers Bessemer Venture Partners, Salesforce Ventures and Viola Growth also participating. The company is not disclosing the valuation.

Zoomin will be using the money to continue building out the functionality of its product and to double down on new customer segments.

Originally targeting tech companies and the needs of business end users — early customers included Dell and McAfee, among others — it’s found some interesting growth into other sectors like the food industry, where customers include Burger King, Tim Hortons, and Popeyes, because, as CEO and co-founder Gal Oron describes it, “your typical fast food company has a lot of franchises, and they use a lot of operating manuals. Just like ServiceNow or McAfee.”

It’s also moving into other sectors like finance and healthcare, he added, and expanding to more than just technical support, which in the B2B world is closely connected to sales support, and sales. That could see Zoomin building products that lay out the information in different ways too.

“Technical content is the new marketing,” Oron said. “Companies invest millions in creating marketing material, but they have hundreds of thousands of pages of HTML with all the relevant details, and their customers are interested in technical stuff.”

Zoomin taps into “content” — the source of its answers — in real time wherever it is being made, and those are also typically the places where Zoomin-generated answers are being delivered, too. Documentation sites, customer service portals, support communities, product applications and anywhere that people are searching for help and chatting are also the typical sources of information that get fed into the Zoomin machine.

The financing underscores how much attention investors (and customers) are giving to business support software these days.

The pandemic led to a major shift in how many of us worked and interacted with services — many more people started to work remotely and carried out all of their everyday duties online. In terms of needing assistance when something isn’t going right, all of that has also shifted online, and has put an immense amount of pressure on the infrastructure that had been built to help with that.

Even at the best of times, customer support is in a tough place. It’s where users go when something isn’t working correctly or when they have another complaint, so even out of the starting gate, it can be a fraught interaction. And agents don’t have it much better at the other end, either. On top of the customers and their demands, they’re also typically working under time, cost, revenue and organizational constraints from the company itself, the classic scylla and charybdis scenario. Given all of that, and the particular circumstances of the last year, tools like Zoomin’s have come into the foreground for companies as one way to cope with all of that.

This round comes just three months after the startup came out of stealth with $21 million disclosed in funding since quietly opening for business in 2019. Oron said that the company has served 60.4 million answers to date to its customers (55 million in 2020): that volume grew 300% last year and its customer base doubled in the same period.

The company is banking on some bigger trends in the industry to see that growth continue. It notes that digital support channels — those site pages you visit that include either chatbots or intuitive search, dialogue boxes across the site, apps, and other places that don’t have live agents helping you — have grown in ubiquity, with some 60% of businesses projected to build self-service portals in the next 12 to 18 months. The proof is in the pudding, so to speak: Zoomin says that the product content that it helps surface can account for up to 70% of a company’s overall web traffic.

That brings up an interesting parallel between what Zoomin does and one of the major traffic controllers of modern times: the search engine. Google dominates how many of us use and discover things on the internet, and it’s been getting increasingly specific with the help that it provides to people, giving “answers” directly on search result pages — whether they are answers to questions, shopping suggestions, news, locations, videos, or any other number of end points.

Oron is quick to say that he has no interest in ever expanding what Zoomin does to make it a consumer-facing tool like Google’s, but it does highlight what a big and tricky problem information organization — or “knowledge orchestration”, as Zoomin refers to it — can be in our disjointed digital world, and the power of a company that can help bring order to that.

While Zoomin may not be interested in climbing the mountain that is competing with Google on its terms, it would be interesting to see how Google evolves its own work in site search, and whether that becomes a competitor on Zoomin’s terms. Zoomin’s terms are to get people to search on company sites themselves, not Google, for answers.

“The first place — a company’s site — is the right location,” Oron said.

Meanwhile, all of the “what ifs” show is that there is indeed a lot of potential here, one reason you’re seeing companies like Salesforce investing alongside the big financial backers.

“We are excited to be supporting Zoomin in this important step of their growth story through an investment that marks our third-ever partnership in the burgeoning Israeli tech market. At General Atlantic, we pride ourselves on identifying category builders and growth-oriented disruptors, and view Zoomin as a natural fit given those priorities,” said Alex Crisses, MD, Global Head of New Investment Sourcing and Co-Head of Emerging Growth at General Atlantic, in a statement.

“Having helped build the increasingly important field of knowledge orchestration from the ground up, Zoomin is providing much-needed value to large enterprises,” added Gary Reiner, a current General Atlantic Operating Partner and previous GE Chief Information Officer. “We look forward to partnering with and supporting Zoomin as they continue to innovate the way that customers experience crucial enterprise product content.”

After weeks of rumors, Xiaomi officially confirmed that it is making a foray into the electric vehicle space. The Chinese smartphone and IoT giant will set up a wholly-owned subsidiary to operate a smart EV business, the company said in a filing on Tuesday.

Xiaomi will inject an initial 10 billion yuan ($1.52 billion) into the venture with the total investment amount to reach $10 billion over the next ten years. Xiaomi founder and CEO Lei Jun will serve as the CEO of the new EV venture.

It’s unclear from the filing whether Xiaomi will sell cars under its own household brand and contract manufacturers to take care of production, as it has done for most of its hardware devices. The company has long billed itself as an “internet firm” with a light-asset business model. The goal is to generate a chunk of its profits by selling services powering a myriad of price-friendly hardware products it sells.

A representative from Xiaomi said the company has no further detail to share beyond the filing.

Xiaomi is the latest Chinese tech company to enter the red-hot EV industry. Chinese search engine giant Baidu recently announced it would be making EVs with the help of automaker Geely.

More to come…

In the world’s largest gaming market, China, console games play a relatively small part as their revenue has been meager compared to mobile and PC games for years — at least by the official numbers (more on this later). There remains a community of hardcore console lovers, but they are finding it harder to get hold of devices and cartridges recently.

A handful of grey market videogame console vendors on Taobao stopped selling and shipping this week, according to checks by TechCrunch and online posts by gamers. Before we examine what might be happening here, a bit of industry history is needed.

In 2000, China banned the sale and import of videogame consoles as concerns over addiction in teenagers grew. Even with the ban, imported consoles still existed in the grey market targeting a group of loyal players. Meanwhile, the online PC and mobile gaming industry flourished, in part thanks to their affordability and the social experience built into their mechanics.

When China finally lifted its restriction on consoles in 2015, giants like Sony and Microsoft quickly responded by releasing Chinese editions of their products through local partners. Nintendo Switch hit the Chinese shelves in 2019 via a much-anticipated partnership with Tencent, which itself is the world’s largest gaming firm. But the grey market largely persisted because mainland Chinese versions of the consoles are subject to strict regulatory oversight, which limits users’ choice to a small friendly range approved by censors.

Many Chinese players thus resort to brick-and-mortar electronics bazaars and online marketplaces to find imported editions of PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch, along with their games. These products normally enter China through parallel trading, the import of legitimate goods through unauthorized channels. The games that are brought in normally lack a Chinese gaming license, which is hard to obtain even by local publishers.

Several major videogame console importers on Taobao have suspended business. Screenshot: TechCrunch

It’s unclear how many imported consoles and console games were taken down from Taobao and what triggered the purge. Tgbus, one of the largest console game sellers on Taobao with 462,000 followers, currently has zero product listing. When asked by TechCrunch, a customer service staff said the store has temporarily halted shipping due to “a water leak in the warehouse.” When we pressed further, the person said it was due to “an electrical-equipment failure.”

Other vendors keep their responses vague, citing “special reasons” for the suspended services. One seller named the “Shanghai Gaming Console Store” said it suspended its business at the request of Taobao, without elaborating further.

Alibaba could not be immediately reached for comment.

The incident appears to inflict mostly console sellers with a sizable business at this moment. Imported cartridges and console devices can still be found on smaller Taobao stores and alternative platforms like Pinduoduo by searching the right keyword.

Some users see the move as China further tightening its grip on what gamers get to play. Over the past year, Apple’s China App Store removed thousands of games to wipe out games without China’s official greenlight. Other motives are politcal. Animal Crossing was pulled from grey market stores on Taobao and Pinduoduo after one of Hong Kong’s most well-known pro-democracy activists used the game as his protest ground.

Other users point out that customs officers regularly clamp down on parallel trading, which is designed to evade import tax because goods are carried by traders who appear as regular travelers. This isn’t the first time the console grey market has been hit, either. Some grey goods manage to fly under the radar before they attract critical sales. There are signs that the new Monster Hunter Rise, a Nintendo-Switch exclusive which isn’t available on the Chinese console edition, is stoking much interest among local players in recent weeks and may have driven some imports.

In the world’s largest gaming market, China, console games play a relatively small part as their revenue has been meager compared to mobile and PC games for years — at least by the official numbers (more on this later). There remains a community of hardcore console lovers, but they are finding it harder to get hold of devices and cartridges recently.

A handful of grey market videogame console vendors on Taobao stopped selling and shipping this week, according to checks by TechCrunch and online posts by gamers. Before we examine what might be happening here, a bit of industry history is needed.

In 2000, China banned the sale and import of videogame consoles as concerns over addiction in teenagers grew. Even with the ban, imported consoles still existed in the grey market targeting a group of loyal players. Meanwhile, the online PC and mobile gaming industry flourished, in part thanks to their affordability and the social experience built into their mechanics.

When China finally lifted its restriction on consoles in 2015, giants like Sony and Microsoft quickly responded by releasing Chinese editions of their products through local partners. Nintendo Switch hit the Chinese shelves in 2019 via a much-anticipated partnership with Tencent, which itself is the world’s largest gaming firm. But the grey market largely persisted because mainland Chinese versions of the consoles are subject to strict regulatory oversight, which limits users’ choice to a small friendly range approved by censors.

Many Chinese players thus resort to brick-and-mortar electronics bazaars and online marketplaces to find imported editions of PlayStation, Xbox, and Nintendo Switch, along with their games. These products normally enter China through parallel trading, the import of legitimate goods through unauthorized channels. The games that are brought in normally lack a Chinese gaming license, which is hard to obtain even by local publishers.

Several major videogame console importers on Taobao have suspended business. Screenshot: TechCrunch

It’s unclear how many imported consoles and console games were taken down from Taobao and what triggered the purge. Tgbus, one of the largest console game sellers on Taobao with 462,000 followers, currently has zero product listing. When asked by TechCrunch, a customer service staff said the store has temporarily halted shipping due to “a water leak in the warehouse.” When we pressed further, the person said it was due to “an electrical-equipment failure.”

Other vendors keep their responses vague, citing “special reasons” for the suspended services. One seller named the “Shanghai Gaming Console Store” said it suspended its business at the request of Taobao, without elaborating further.

Alibaba could not be immediately reached for comment.

The incident appears to inflict mostly console sellers with a sizable business at this moment. Imported cartridges and console devices can still be found on smaller Taobao stores and alternative platforms like Pinduoduo by searching the right keyword.

Some users see the move as China further tightening its grip on what gamers get to play. Over the past year, Apple’s China App Store removed thousands of games to wipe out games without China’s official greenlight. Other motives are politcal. Animal Crossing was pulled from grey market stores on Taobao and Pinduoduo after one of Hong Kong’s most well-known pro-democracy activists used the game as his protest ground.

Other users point out that customs officers regularly clamp down on parallel trading, which is designed to evade import tax because goods are carried by traders who appear as regular travelers. This isn’t the first time the console grey market has been hit, either. Some grey goods manage to fly under the radar before they attract critical sales. There are signs that the new Monster Hunter Rise, a Nintendo-Switch exclusive which isn’t available on the Chinese console edition, is stoking much interest among local players in recent weeks and may have driven some imports.

IBM has installed a couple of its own Quantum System One machines across the world in recent years, but today it announced its first private-sector U.S. deployment thanks to a new ten-year partnership with the Cleveland Clinic. This not only marks IBM’s first U.S. install of one of its quantum computers outside of its own facilities, but also the first time a healthcare institute purchases and houses a quantum computer. And thanks to this deal, Cleveland will also get access to IBM’s upcoming next-gen 1,000+ qubit quantum system.

We’re still in the very early days of commercializing quantum computing and for most current users, having access to a system over the cloud is sufficient for the experiments they are running. But increasingly, we are seeing research institutes and even some commercial users who are looking to install on-premises quantum computers to have full access to a dedicated machine.

This new deal is part of a larger partnership between IBM and the Cleveland Clinic, which also involves IBM’s hybrid cloud portfolio for high-performance computing and its AI tools. The partnership also forms the foundation of Cleveland Clinic’s new Center for Pathogen Research & Human Health, which is supported by $500 million in investments from the State of Ohio, Jobs Ohio and Cleveland Clinic.

“What we’re announcing here is the first — I’m going to call them private sector or nonprofit — but still, it’s the first sort of non-government organization that is going to have not only fully dedicated systems, but what is really, really remarkable is our commitment for the decades,” Dario Gil, IBM’s SVP and Director of IBM Research, told me. “In a way, they are partnering with us for the entire roadmap. So it’s not only taking receipt and getting access to a fleet of quantum computers and the next-generation quantum computer for next year. They’re also the first ones who are signing up and says, ‘I want the first 1,000+ qubit system.”

He noted that it takes a very forward-looking organization to invest heavily in quantum computing today. It’s one thing for a nation-state to start working with this nascent technology, given the potential it has in a wide variety of fields, but it’s another for a non-profit to make a similar bet. “The level of ambition is really, really high on their end because they’re thinking about the future,” Gil said of the Cleveland Clinic’s leadership.

Gil noted that as part of the overall deal, Cleveland Clinic’s researchers will also get access to IBM’s entire quantum portfolio in the cloud. IBM will maintain and support the on-premises quantum computer and they will remain IBM-owned machines, similar to its deals with government research labs in Japan and Germany, he explained.

“Maintaining it and supporting it is really critical,” Gil said about why that’s the case. “And they need us and our expertise to be able to do that. And also, you know, we do it because it’s like one of the most sensitive technologies that we have in IBM. So we are exquisitely focused on maintaining the security and safety for the machines.”

As part of the overall deal, IBM and Cleveland Clinic will also work on building skills among Cleveland Clinic’s researchers in quantum computing, but also AI and high-performance computing.

“Through this innovative collaboration, we have a unique opportunity to bring the future to life,” said Tom Mihaljevic, M.D., President and CEO of Cleveland Clinic. “These new computing technologies will revolutionize discovery in the life sciences and ultimately improve people’s lives. The Discovery Accelerator will enable our renowned teams to build a forward-looking digital infrastructure and transform medicine, while training the workforce of the future and growing our economy.”

After partnering with Patreon last year to support patron-only podcasts, Acast has developed a full suite of subscription tools called Acast+.

The company has experimented with paywalled podcasts beyond Patreon in the past, but Acast+ appears to be its most comprehensive offering yet. Podcasters who run ads from Acast will be able to introduce a variety of other paid options, such as ad-free streams, exclusive episodes and early access to content.

Listeners will be able to access this content from the podcast players of their choice, including Apple Podcasts and Google Podcasts.

In exchange, Acast will take a cut of subscription revenue — Vice President of Product Matt MacDonald described this as “part of the overall package of using Acast,” with podcasters benefiting from having the full monetization experience managed within Acast. That means they can upload and manage access to all their content from a single system (rather than having separate paid and free feeds) while also getting the “full revenue picture” of both their advertising income and subscription income.

MacDonald said it’s also crucial that Acast is supporting subscription access across podcast players, rather than creating a listening app or destination of its own.

“”That’s a really clear distinction,” he said. “We want to make sure the podcaster’s listeners are their listeners. We’re just giving them a financial tool to help them build a relationship with the listeners that are supporting their show.”

Acast co-founder Johan Billgren also noted that podcasters can customize the experience down to the names of the subscription tiers and even what subscribers are called. He also said that after the launch of Acast+, the company will continue working with Patreon.

“We want to give the most options to the creator,” Billgren said. “They are in charge of their relationship, and if Patreon is the best option for them, we want to give them that option.”

Image Credits: Acast

More broadly, he suggested that Acast+ reflects “a big shift” as podcasts go from from being “completely free and ad-funded” to a pursuing a broader range of business models.

“I think that the financial relationship is an expression of the overall relationship,” MacDonald added. (Listener relationship-building was also a theme in Acast’s acquisition of RadioPublic last month.) But certainly the financial side is important: “There are a number of times that I’ve heard podcasters say, ‘If I could make just a little bit more money, I could squeak out another episode.’ We’re giving them the financial pathways to do that.”

Acast+ is currently in beta testing and accepting signups from interested podcasters.

Google is announcing a handful of major updates to Google Maps today that range from bringing its Live View AR directions indoors to adding weather data to its maps, but the most tantalizing news — which in typical Google fashion doesn’t have an ETA just yet — is that Google plans to bring a vastly improved 3D layer to Google maps.

Using photogrammetry, the same technology that also allows Microsoft’s Flight Simulator to render large swaths of the world in detail, Google is also building a model of the world for its Maps service.

“We’re going to continue to improve that technology that helps us fuse together the billions of aerials, StreetView and satellite images that we have to really help us move from that flat 2D map to a more accurate 3D model than we’ve ever had. And be able to do that more quickly. And to bring more detail to it than we’ve ever been able to do before,” Dane Glasgow, Google’s VP for Geo Product Experience, said in a press event ahead of today’s announcement. He noted that this 3D layer will allow the company to visualize all its data in new and interesting ways.

Image Credits: Google

How exactly this will play out in reality remains to be seen, but Glasgow showed off a new 3D route preview, for example, with all of the typically mapping data overlayed on top of the 3D map.

Glasgow also noted that this technology will allow Google to parse out small features like stoplights and building addresses, which in turn will result in better directions.

“We also think that the 3D imagery will allow us to visualize a lot of new information and data overlaid on top, you know, everything from helpful information like traffic or accidents, transit delays, crowdedness — there’s lots of potential here to bring new information,” he explained.

Image Credits: Google

As for the more immediate future, Google announced a handful of new features today that are all going to roll out in the coming months. Indoor Live View is the flashiest of these. Google’s existing AR Live View walking directions currently only work outdoors, but thanks to some advances in its technology to recognize where exactly you are (even without a good GPS signal), the company is now able to bring this indoors. This feature is already live in some malls in the U.S. in Chicago, Long Island, Los Angeles, Newark, San Francisco, San Jose, and Seattle, but in the coming months, it’ll come to select airports, malls and transit stations in Tokyo and Zurich as well (just in time for vaccines to arrive and travel to — maybe — rebound). Because Google is able to locate you by comparing the images around you to its database, it can also tell what floor you are on and hence guide you to your gate at the Zurich airport, for example (though in my experience, there are few places with better signage than airports…).

Also new are layers for weather data (but not weather radar) and air quality in Google Maps. The weather layer will be available globally on Android and iOS in the coming months, with the air quality layer only launching for Australia, India and the U.S. at first.

Image Credits: Google

Talking about air quality, Google Maps will also get a new eco-friendly routing option that lets you pick the driving route that produces the least CO2 (coming to Android and iOS later this year), and it will finally feature support for low emission zones, a feature of many a European City. Low emission zones on Google Maps will launch in June in Germany, France, Spain and the UK on Android and iOS. More countries will follow later.

And to bring this all together, Google will update its directions interface to show you all of the possible modes of transportations and routing options, prioritized based on your own preferences, as well as based on what’s popular in the city you are in (think he subway in NYC or bike-sharing in Portland).

Also new are more integrated options for curbside grocery pickups in partnership with Instacart and Albertsons, if that’s your thing.

And there you have it. As is so often the case with Google’s announcement, the most exciting new features the company showed off don’t have an ETA and may never launch, but until then you can hold yourself over by getting your weather forecasts on Google Maps.

Staffbase, which provides an intranet-style internal communications platform for companies, has raised a $145 million (€122 million) financing round led by General Atlantic, a growth equity firm. Existing investors Insight Partners and e.ventures also participated in the round.

Started in Chemnitz in Germany in 2014, Staffbase has managed to onboard over 1,000 clients including Adidas, Audi, BHP, Deutsche Post DHL, Groupon, Hitachi, Ikea, Johns Hopkins University, McKesson, Paulaner, Suncor, Viessmann, and Volvo, among others.

In early March this year, the company merged with Bananatag, the Canadian provider of internal communications solutions.

The COVID-19 pandemic has of course accelerated the adoption of digital tools for companies, so Staffbase is reaping the benefits of that shift. The company’s main competitors include Dynamic Signal (raised $114.8M) and Social Chorus (raised $47M). In the category of intranets, competitors include Simpplr (raised $29.1M) and Unily (raised $68M).

Staffbase claims its advantages are that it brings together mobile employee apps and intranets into one platform, as well as integrating with the Microsoft 365 ecosystem, as well as the messaging platform Slack.

Dr. Martin Böhringer, co-founder and CEO of Staffbase, said in a statement: “We provide managers and communications specialists at enterprise companies with the leading digital platform for successful employee communications – a platform that we are expanding very rapidly. The partnership with General Atlantic will further help us achieve this and accelerate our growth, especially in North America.”

Dr. Christian Figge, managing director at General Atlantic, said: “Staffbase is a global pioneer and has developed software that specifically addresses the employee experience, supporting enterprises in transforming internal communications and engagement… Staffbase is a prime example of the quality of entrepreneurship and range of innovative companies with global ambitions emerging out of Germany.”

Staffbase has a workforce of 450 employees throughout 11 locations, including offices in London, New York, Vancouver, Amsterdam, and Berlin.