Year: 2021

BMW’s Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm is investing in Kodiak Robotics, a company that develops autonomous trucking technology. 

Kodiak will use the funds to build out a safety case for its self-driving tech stack so it can more quickly commercialize. It will also work on hiring fresh talent and expanding its truck fleet, with a stated goal of at least doubling the number of vehicles it operates each year. The startup currently has 10 trucks in rotation between its commercial route in Texas and its test pilot in Mountain View, California. 

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. BMW i Ventures usually invests in companies that can provide solutions to BMW’s current and future business, but Kodiak’s CEO and co-founder Don Burnette told TechCrunch that BMW’s investment was purely financial and not strategic, meaning there is currently no technical partnership between the two. 

This new investment comes just a week after tire-maker Bridgestone announced a minority stake in Kodiak. The financials behind that deal were not revealed either. To date, Kodiak has publicly announced $40 million in funding from its Series A, and Burnette says the startup has had several additional investments since then. 

Burnette also shared the company’s plans to achieve driverless operations at scale for less than 10% of what Waymo has publicly raised to date – $5.7 billion – and less than 25% of TuSimple’s total existing fundraise – about $1.94 billion, including the money it raised through its IPO. That leaves us with a number roughly around $500 million. 

“That’s the total amount of money that we think we need to get to driverless, and that’s because we think we’ve been a much more efficient company up until this point, and we will continue to be much more efficient going forward,” said Burnette. 

The BMW i Ventures funding will eventually make up part of Kodiak’s Series B. With this latest investment, the company isn’t trying to further develop its self-driving capabilities or features, but rather it wants to build out its safety case and prove that its system can handle the road with no driver on board, says Burnette. 

“We are building toward a Level 4 autonomy system, but we still have a driver in the seat that’s actually monitoring our system at all times,” said Burnette. “Today, we are technically a Level 2 system, which is true for just about everybody else out there.”

Vehicles with a human driver supervising operations such as steering, brake and acceleration support, as well as things like lane centering and adaptive cruise control fit under the Society of Automobile Engineer’s (SAE) definition of Level 2 autonomy. Level 4 means the vehicle can handle all aspects of driving in certain conditions without human intervention. 

Kodiak says it’s made progress. In January it announced its Kodiak Driver achieved “disengagement-free deliveries” (meaning the autonomous system didn’t have to be switched off for safety reasons) during a commercial route from Dallas to Houston. The company has been running this route out of its Dallas testing and operations facility for two years, and says it’s now achieved a level of maturity where the system can handle anything the highway throws at it. 

“We’re doing really complex and advanced maneuvers, not just handling obvious things like merges and cut-ins and heavy traffic, but also more nuanced challenges like identifying vehicles that are pulled over on the side of the road,” said Burnette. “Our system can automatically identify that and then slow down as required by law, or nudge away from that object to give it more space. It can also consider making a lane change if a lane is available, a way to give even more clearance to the stalled vehicle on the side, and this is exactly how humans drive.”

To get to the point where Kodiak can prove its tech is actually safer than a human driver, and thus suitable for operating commercially at scale, the startup has to build up its total miles driven in simulated environments, structured testing on a private closed track, and in real world driving. 

Burnette says Kodiak is the only company that doesn’t designate one type of sensor as ‘primary,’ and rather takes a comprehensive approach, meaning it’s not a lidar-first or vision-first company. Tesla’s head of AI Andrej Karpathy recently revealed the company’s new supercomputer which takes a vision-only approach, but Burnette fundamentally disagrees with that method. 

“We believe that each of these different modalities have strengths and weaknesses, and our objective is to take advantage of those strengths and cover the weaknesses with other modalities, and so we’ve created a sensor fusion algorithm that allows us to consider which sensors are advantageous in the moments where they give us the most usable information,” said Burnette.

Kodiak doesn’t use HD mapping either, so its trucks see in real time on the road, which allows the Kodiak Driver to be flexible when it comes to changing road conditions or environments. The system is trained using data collected by Kodiak’s trucks, as well as on scenarios devised by its engineers, and that data is auto-labeled using Scale AI, which is one of the ways Kodiak is able to keep down costs, says Burnette. 

Kodiak’s team hails from Google’s original self-driving team, Uber, Lyft and other notable tech companies. Burnette says BMW i Ventures’ investment in the company came after a thorough vetting process in which the firm sent over their autonomous driving experts and dug into the team’s expertise and tech.

Deliveroo has had another win in the UK courts, beating back an appeal by the IWGB union which has sought for years to challenge the gig platform over couriers’ rights but has continued to fail to overturn the company’s classification of riders as self-employed.

The latest appeals court ruling is the fourth judgment in the UK that supports Deliveroo’s contention that its riders are self-employed, following earlier judgments by the Central Arbitration Committee and two at the High Court.

The on-demand food delivery platform operates a different gig model to ride-hailing giant Uber — which has, by contrast, failed to prevent UK courts from judging its drivers to be workers not self-employed contractors.

Deliveroo, for example, allows riders to use a substitute to fulfil a shift with only limited restrictions on the practice. And the interpretation of how exactly employment law applies typically hinges on exactly such nuanced details as the level of flexibility being offered to platform workers.

Despite a string of legal loses against Deliveroo over the years, the IWGB did not give up its fight. Most recently honing in on the issue of collective bargaining, and seeking to challenge the platform giant’s stance under the European Convention on Human Rights — by arguing riders have a legal right to form or join a union.

It hasn’t had much success with this line of argument against Deliveroo either, though.

And today the UK Court of Appeal dismissed its latest appeal — ruling that riders do not fall under the scope of the trade union freedom right set out in the European Convention of Human Rights.

Although the Court did suggest that riders do fall under “the more general right of freedom of association under article 11 [of the ECoHR]”.

In conclusion the judges also make a point of noting that other gig economy legal challenges may have a different outcome, writing that: “It may be thought that those in the gig economy have a particular need of the right to organise as a trade union. So I quite accept that there may be other cases where, on different facts and with a broader range of available arguments, a different result may eventuate.”

The IWGB’s president, Alex Marshall, seized on this element of the ruling — commenting in a statement:

“The judgment recognises that riders would benefit from organising collectively to represent their interests and admits the conclusion reached in the judgment might seem counter intuitive. We will now consider our legal position, but one thing is for sure: We will continue to grow in numbers and fight on the streets until Deliveroo give these key worker heroes the pay and conditions they more than deserve.”

In further remarks, Marshall attacked Deliveroo’s stance toward riders — claiming it has sought to “silence” their voices and deny them opportunities to negotiate better terms:

“Deliveroo couriers have been working on the frontline of the pandemic and whilst being applauded by the public and even declared heroes by their employer, they have been working under increasingly unfair and unsafe working conditions. The reward they have received for their Herculean effort? Deliveroo continuing to invest thousands of pounds in litigation to silence workers’ voices and deny them the opportunity to negotiate better terms and conditions. A recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed riders were making as little as £2 per hour. Is this the kind of pay workers would accept if they really were their own boss? It appears that when Deliveroo talk about flexibility and being your own boss, it is talking about the flexibility of choosing when to make poverty wages and work in unsafe conditions.”

In a statement welcoming the appeal court ruling, Deliveroo claimed the contrary — saying:

“Today is good news for Deliveroo riders and marks an important milestone. UK courts have now tested and upheld the self-employed status of Deliveroo riders four times.

“Our message to riders is clear. We will continue to back your right to work the way you want and we will continue to listen to you and respond to the things that matter to you most.

“Deliveroo’s model offers the genuine flexibility that is only compatible with self-employment, providing riders with the work they tell us they value. Those campaigning to remove riders’ flexibility do not speak for the vast majority of riders and seek to impose a way of working that riders do not want. Deliveroo will continue to campaign for companies like ours to be able to offer the full flexibility of self employment along with greater benefits and more security.”

Visa has announced plans to acquire Tink for €1.8 billion, or $2.15 billion at today’s exchange rate. Tink has been a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interface (API).

Today’s move comes a few months after Visa abandoned its acquisition of Plaid, another popular open banking startup. Originally, Visa planned to spend $5.3 billion to acquire the American startup. But the company had to call off the acquisition after running into a regulatory wall.

Tink offers a single API so that customers can connect to bank accounts from their own apps and services. For instance, you can leverage Tink’s API to access account statements, initiate payments, fetch banking information and refresh this data regularly.

While banks and financial institutions now all have to offer open banking interfaces due to EU’s Payment Services Directive PSD2, there’s no single standard. Tink integrates with 3,400 banks and financial institutions.

App developers can use the same API call to interact with bank accounts across various financial institutions. As you may have guessed, it greatly simplifies the adoption of open banking features.

300 banks and fintech startups use Tink’s API to access third-party bank information — clients include PayPal, BNP Paribas, American Express and Lydia. Overall, Tink covers 250 million bank customers across Europe.

Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Tink operations should continue as usual after the acquisition. Visa plans to retain the brand and management team.

According to Crunchbase data, Tink has raised over $300 million from Dawn Capital, Eurazeo, HMI Capital, Insight Partners, PayPal Ventures, Creades, Heartcore Capital and others.

“For the past ten years we have worked relentlessly to build Tink into a leading open banking platform in Europe, and we are incredibly proud of what the whole team at Tink has created together,” Tink co-founder and CEO Daniel Kjellén said in a statement. “We have built something incredible and at the same time we have only scratched the surface.”

“Joining Visa, we will be able to move faster and reach further than ever before. Visa is the perfect partner for the next stage of Tink’s journey, and we are incredibly excited about what this will bring to our employees, customers and for the future of financial services.”

Remittances — specifically when people in developed countries send money to family or friends in emerging markets — continues to be a huge lever to help those in more challenging economies survive and improve their lot. Today, a startup that has built a remittance platform that it believes is the most economically sympathetic and useful to the people who use those services the most is announcing some funding to continue growing.

Taptap Send, which provides a “free” mobile money transfer service from eight countries to 15 others, has raised $13.4 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its scope and the services that it provides to its customers.

The 15 receiver countries include some of the poorest countries in the world that are the hardest to service, plus emerging markets with some of the poorest populations — DR Congo, Mali, and Madagascar among them — while the eight originator countries include some of the most common places to which people from these countries emigrate — United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, France and Italy among them.

The Series A was co-led by Canaan Partners and Reid Hoffman, with other unnamed investors also participating.

There is a reason that a lot of companies launch and build services in countries like the U.S. or regions like Western Europe: there is a lot of money there, and specifically consumers and businesses with the kind of income that allows them to invest in new technologies and simply to do more. Of course, that doesn’t mean that other, less wealthy demographics don’t exist, or don’t also need new technology; but building for them is usually less lucrative and more risky.

Taptap Send is among the startups that is trying to approach the promise of tech with this in mind, and with a view to bucking that trend. The company’s business model works by way of charging no commission or any other fees for transfers, instead making a cut on foreign exchange. It has built its whole tech stack from the ground up and says that this lets it pass on lower exchange rates to its customers, typically lower than others that might be serving the same markets. On top of this, there is an economy of scale principle at play here: having better rates will drive more users, which in turn might not mean better margins but a higher volume of transacting and more returns overall.

The startup is the third entrepreneurial outing for Michael Faye, a development economist who previously worked for the United Nations. Before Taptap Send, Fay founded GiveDirectly and Segovia. In each business, he’s tried to take the same approach: building financial technology to improve the lot of people living in emerging markets. GiveDirectly (still going strong) did this for philanthropic donations — it’s an NGO that sets up donation campaigns where individuals and big businesses can contribute, and people in receiving countries can directly get the funding via mobile money transfers. Segovia (acquired by Crown Agents Bank) did this for B2B use cases — it built a mobile-money-transfer-as-a-service, which other money transfer companies could use to power their businesses, by way of an API.

Taptap Send can be thought of as Faye’s hat trick in the space, taking the bigger concept of remittances used to help people, and building it as a C2C business: aimed at individuals who are sending people “back home” money to live on.

“Taptap Send is taking advantage of this structural change in mobile money and other distribution networks to offer what we hope is the fastest and best price service to customers,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.

Taken together, cross-border remittances is a massive market, worth some $540 billion annually when you consider the established channels, with more “informal” methods (which can be as analogue as passing money via a person making a trip from one country to the other) estimated to be of nearly the same size. They are also, in fact, more valuable even than foreign direct investment: the World Bank has tracked that remittances overtook the money donated by states in 2019.

Mobile technology has played a big part in that, making it easier both to send and receive money, but it’s also opened the door to a lot of potential exploitation by bad actors, preying on people who might use a service for convenience and not be fully clear on how the actual pricing breaks down.

For that reason, the UN has set a goal for remittance pricing and commissions to be no higher for any company than 3% of the total sent — one way to ensure that players focus more on volume and less on margins. Taptap send says that it’s the only company in the space that has publicly committed to that goal (it has yet to hit it, it seems).

The company is not yet disclosing many numbers on its size or customers served but Faye tells me business overall grew 5x in the last year, and is posting a gross profit. “Even with everything happening you did see this massive increase in digitization,” he said of Covid-19 and its impact on business. He’s also undeterred by the vast amounts of competition in the space, which includes not just companies like Western Union and Money Gram but lots and lots of smaller remittance startups like Remitly, World Remit, and many more without the word “remit” in their names. “It’s easy to look at remittance and say it’s crowded, but so was video conferencing before Zoom or social networking before Facebook,” he said.

This is also why investors are interested.

“The company has a nuanced, yet powerful strategy that Michael has put into place to allow [it] to be the lowest-cost provider in every market they enter. As the world rapidly shifts toward digital wallets and e-money, it creates an opportunity for remittance companies to create an even more magical experience by sending funds directly to those wallets,” noted Brendan Dickinson, a general partner at Canaan. “Taptap Send gives as much of cost savings as possible to the customer, and as a result, is almost always the cheapest player in the market. All of that makes it economically viable to send smaller remittances – and in doing so, expands the total market and volume of remittances sent. This approach is strongly resonating with customers, as Taptap Send’s massive growth has been 90+% organic.”

While the cryptocurrency market’s most recent hype wave seems to be dying down after a spectacular rise, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm is reaffirming its commitment to startups building blockchain projects with a hulking new $2.2 billion crypto fund.

It’s the firm’s largest vertical-specific fund ever — by quite a bit.

Andreessen Horowitz’s 2018 crypto fund ushered in $300 million of LP commitments and its second fund, which it closed in April of last year, clocked in at $515 million. The new multi-billion dollar fund not only showcases how institutional backers are growing more comfortable with cryptocurrencies, but also how Andreessen Horowitz’s assets under management have been quickly swelling to compete with other deep-pocketed firms including the ever-prolific Tiger Global.

With this announcement, Andreessen now has some $18.8 billion assets under management.

LPs are likely far less wary to take a chance on crypto after Andreessen Horowitz’s stake in Coinbase equated to some $11.2 billion at the time of the direct listing’s first trades, though the stock has slid back some 30% in recent months as the crypto market has shrunk.

Some of the firm’s other major crypto bets include NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs which hit a $7.5 billion valuation this spring. Blockchain infrastructure startup Dfinity raised at a $9.5 billion valuation this past September. Last year, the firm led the Series A of Uniswap, which is poised to be a major player in the Ethereum ecosystem. In addition to equity investments, a16z has also made major bets on the currencies themselves.

An earlier report from Newcomer last month reported a16z was targeting a $2 billion crypto fund and that they had already unloaded some of their crypto holdings before most cryptocurrencies took a major dive in recent weeks.

Crypto Fund III will continue to be managed by GPs Chris Dixon and Katie Haun, but the firm has also begun spinning out a more robust management team around the crypto vertical.

Anthony Albanese, who joined the firm last year from the NYSE, has been appointed COO of the division. Tomicah Tillemann, who previously served as a senior advisor to now-President Joe Biden and as chairman of the Global Blockchain Business Council, will be a16z Crypto’s Global Head of Policy. Rachael Horwitz is also coming aboard as an Operating Partner leading marketing and communications for a16z crypto; leaving Google after a stint as Coinbase’s first VP of Communications as well.

A couple other folks are also coming on in advisory capacity, including entrepreneur Alex Price and a couple others who will likely be a tad helpful in regulatory maneuverings including Bill Hinman, formerly of the SEC, and Brent McIntosh, who recently served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs.

Snowflake changed the conversation for many companies when it comes to the potentials of data warehousing. Now one of the startups that’s hoping to disrupt the disruptor is announcing a big round of funding to expand its own business.

Firebolt, which has built a new kind of cloud data warehouse that promises much more efficient, and cheaper, analytics around whatever is stored within it, is announcing a major Series B of $127 million on the heels of huge demand for its services.

The company, which only came out of stealth mode in December, is not disclosing its valuation with this round, which brings the total raised by the Israeli company to $164 million. New backers Dawn Capital and K5 Global are in this round, alongside previous backers Zeev Ventures, TLV Partners, Bessemer Venture Partners, and Angular Ventures.

Nor is it disclosing many details about its customers at the moment. CEO and co-founder Eldad Farkash told me in an interview that most of them are US-based, and that the numbers have grown from the dozen or so that were using Firebolt when it was still in stealth mode (it worked quietly for a couple of years building its product and onboarding customers before finally launching six months ago). They are all migrating from existing data warehousing solutions like Snowflake or BigQuery. In other words, its customers are already cloud-native, big-data companies: it’s not trying to proselytize on the basic concept but work with those who are already in a specific place as a business.

“If you’re not using Snowflake or BigQuery already, we prefer you come back to us later,” he said. Judging by the size and quick succession of the round, that focus is paying off.

The challenge that Firebolt set out to tackle is that while data warehousing has become a key way for enterprises to analyze, update and manage their big data stores — after all, your data is only as good as the tools you have to parse it and keep it secure — typically data warehousing solutions are not efficient, and they can cost a lot of money to maintain.

The challenge was seen first-hand by the three founders of Firebolt, Farkash (CEO), Saar Bitner (COO) and Ariel Yaroshevich (CTO) when they were at a previous company, the business intelligence powerhouse Sisense, where respectively they were one of its co-founders and two members of its founding team. At Sisense, the company continually came up against an issue: When you are dealing in terabytes of data, cloud data warehouses were straining to deliver good performance to power its analytics and other tools, and the only way to potentially continue to mitigate that was by piling on more cloud capacity. And that started to become very expensive.

Firebolt set out to fix that by taking a different approach, re-architecting the concept. As Farkash sees it, while data warehousing has indeed been a big breakthrough in big data, it has started to feel like a dated solution as data troves have grown.

“Data warehouses are solving yesterday’s problem, which was, ‘How do I migrate to the cloud and deal with scale?’ ” he told me back in December. Google’s BigQuery, Amazon’s RedShift and Snowflake as fitting answers for that issue, believes, but “we see Firebolt as the new entrant in that space, with a new take on design on technology. We change the discussion from one of scale to one of speed and efficiency.”

The startup claims that its performance is up to 182 times faster than that of other data warehouses with a SQL-based system that works on academic research that had yet to be applied anywhere, around how to handle data in a lighter way, using new techniques in compression and how data is parsed. Data lakes in turn can be connected with a wider data ecosystem, and what it translates to is a much smaller requirement for cloud capacity. And lower costs.

Fast forward to today, and the company says the concept is gaining a lot of traction with engineers and developers in industries like business intelligence, customer-facing services that need to parse a lot of information to serve information to users in real-time, and back-end data applications. That is proving out what investors suspected would be a shift before the startup even launched, stealthily or otherwise.

“I’ve been an investor at Firebolt since their Series A round and before they had any paying customers,” said Oren Zeev of Zeev Ventures. “What had me invest in Firebolt is mostly the team. A group of highly experienced executives mostly from the big data space who understand the market very well, and the pain organizations are experiencing. In addition, after speaking to a few of my portfolio companies and Firebolt’s initial design partners, it was clear that Firebolt is solving a major pain, so all in all, it was a fairly easy decision. The market in which Firebolt operates is huge if you consider the valuations of Snowflake and Databricks. Even more importantly, it is growing rapidly as the migration from on-premise data warehouse platforms to the cloud is gaining momentum, and as more and more companies rely on data for their operations and are building data applications.”

Illumio, a self-styled zero trust unicorn, has closed a $225 million Series F funding round at a $2.75 billion valuation. 

The round was led by Thoma Bravo, which recently bought cybersecurity vendor Proofpoint by $12.3 billion, and supported by Franklin Templeton, Hamilton Lane, and Blue Owl Capital. 

The round lands more than two years after Illumio’s Series E funding round in which it raised $65 million, and fueled speculation of an impending IPO. The company’s founder, Andrew Rubin, still isn’t ready to be pressed on whether the company plans to go public, though he told TechCrunch: “If we do our job right, and if we make our customers successful, I’d like to think that would be part of our journey.”

Illumio’s latest funding round is well-timed. Not only does it come amid a huge rise in successful cyberattacks which show that some of the more traditional cybersecurity measures are no longer working, from the SolarWinds hack in early 2020 to the more recent attack on Colonial Pipeline, but it also comes just weeks after President Joe Biden issued an executive order pushing federal agencies to implement significant cybersecurity initiatives, including a zero trust architecture. 

“And just a couple of weeks ago, Anne Neuberger [deputy national security adviser for cybersecurity] put out a memo on White House stationary to all of corporate America saying we’re living through a ransomware pandemic, and here’s six things that we’re imploring you to do,” Rubin says. “One of them was to segment your network.”

Illumio focuses on protecting data centers and cloud networks through something it calls micro-segmentation, which it claims makes it easier to manage and guard against potential breaches, as well as to contain a breach if one occurs. This zero trust approach to security — a concept centered on the belief that businesses should not automatically trust anything inside or outside its perimeters — has never been more important for organizations, according to Illumio. 

“Cyber events are no longer constrained to cyber space,” says Rubin. “That’s why people are finally saying that, after 30 years of relying solely on detection to keep us safe, we cannot rely on it 100% of the time. Zero trust is now becoming the mantra.”

Illumio tells TechCrunch it will use the newly raised funds to make a “huge” investment in its field operations and channel partner network, and to invest in innovation, engineering and its product. 

The late-stage startup, which was founded in 2013 and is based in California, says more than 10% of Fortune 100 companies — including Morgan Stanley, BNP Paribas SA and Salesforce — now use its technology to protect their data centers, networks and other applications. It saw 100% international growth during the pandemic, and says it’s also broadening its customer base across more industries. 

The company has raised more now raised more $550 million from investors include Andreessen Horowitz, General Catalyst and Formation 8.

Jio Platforms, run by India’s richest man (Mukesh Ambani), and Google on Thursday unveiled JioPhone Next, an affordable Android smartphone as the top Indian telecom operator makes further push to make it more affordable for people to sign up to its network.

The Indian firm, which secured $4.5 billion investment from Google (and another $15.5 billion from Facebook and others) last year and shared plans to work on low-cost smartphones, said the JioPhone Next will help roughly 300 million users in India who are still on 2G network upgrade.

The phone, which is “powered by extremely optimized Android” operating system, will first launch in India this September and eventually be made available outside of the country.

Jio Platforms, which serves 425 million subscribers, is positioned to add another 200 million in the next few years, said Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, at its annual general meeting Thursday.

The JioPhone Next will be the “most affordable smartphone” globally, said Ambani.

Even as most smartphones that ship in India, the second largest market, are priced at $150 or less, customers looking for a smartphone priced under $100 are left with little choice. And that choice has further shrunk in recent years.

Research firm Counterpoint told TechCrunch that the sub-$100 smartphones accounted for just 12% of the Indian smartphone market, down from 18% in 2019 and 24% in 2018. Sub-$50 smartphones represented just 0.3% of the entire market in 2020, down from 4.3% in 2018.

Smartphone makers are aware of this whitespace in the market, but have found it incredibly challenging to meet this demand. Some, including Jio Platforms, which has amassed over 425 million subscribers, earlier explored a range of feature phones to reach small cities and towns of India. Jio Platforms’ KaiOS-powered feature phone, called JioPhone, had amassed 100 million customers as of late February this year.

In a recent report to clients, analysts at UBS said that after accounting the recent price surge of memory component, any smartphone priced at or under $50 is likely selling at cost.

“While this move by Jio will accelerate 2G to 4G migration, we evaluated how interesting this space would be for other smartphone manufacturers, especially key players like Xiaomi. Xiaomi, the unit market leader in smartphones in India, is unlikely to follow up with a $50 smartphone, in our view,” they wrote in the report, obtained by TechCrunch.

Google, too, has previously made several efforts — $100 Android One smartphones program in 2014 and low-resource intensive Android Go operating system in 2017 — to expand the reach of its handsets. The company has also backed KaiOS, which powers popular feature phones.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

US/Israeli startup, Sorbet – which helps companies de-risk themselves against accrued paid time off (PTO) by employees — has raised another $15M, in a round led By Dovi Frances’ Group 11, not long after a $6 million seed round only last April.

Sorbet says it removes the burden of PTO from employers, allowing employees to ‘spend’ it in offers and other types of deals, giving employers far more control over the whole process and the ability to forecast ahead. It does this by buying out PTO liabilities from employees and loading the cash value of the PTO on prepaid Credit Cards. It then refinances these liabilities for employers, hence the forecasting advantage.

Veetahl Eilat-Raichel, founder and CEO, said: “It’s clear that we’re in the midst of a tectonic shift in employer-employee dynamics and with inbound global interest exceeding our wildest expectations, I had the great privilege of picking and choosing the best investors to help us expand and accelerate. I can think of no better partner than Dovi and the entire Group 11 team to join us, and am thrilled and humbled to have them alongside our already stellar group of investors.”

Dovi Frances, Founding Partner, Group 11 said: “At Group 11 we pride ourselves in our unique ability to uncover the unicorns of tomorrow. Veetahl and the team did something exceedingly difficult which is to uncover a massive market inefficiency hiding in plain sight. With a $270B market opportunity, it was crystal clear to me this was the time to push forward and not look back.”

Following Wise’s announcement earlier this month that it planned to go public by way of a direct listing on the LSE, today the company made the news formal with a regulatory filing. The London-based company — formerly known as TransferWise and primarily in the business of transferring money across different currencies — with 10 million users said it plans to list in “early July 2021” but did not provide further details on pricing of its class A shares, in keeping with how direct listings work. It’s been reported, however, that the plan is for the valuation to be in the range of $6 billion to $7 billion with the listing.

(Overall, Wise has put in place a dual-class share structure in place with two classes of shares in issue, class A shares and class B shares, in order to support Wise’s focus on its mission as it transitions into the public markets, it noted. Class B shares are not tradeable.)

“The Company will not set a price in respect of the class A shares or offer any class A shares in connection with the direct listing,” it noted in the statement. “The opening price of the class A shares will be determined in the opening auction on the date of Admission.” While direct listings have somewhat taken off as a route for tech companies to go public in the U.S. — a trend spearheaded by another European juggernaut, Spotify — this is a new turn for the LSE, which published its own new rules on the process the same day that Wise announced its plans.

In the meantime, we can watch for more details around the public offering, and updates about the company’s business, will be coming out in a prospectus and other related statements in the coming days and weeks.

Bypassing the big investment banks and the related roadshow of a more conventional listing can be a bold move, one that companies who want to avoid the volatility and commitment of that process might opt to take if they feel they have enough momentum to hit the market directly. Wise in its statement today hinted that there has been some early interest, based on its share offering to Wise customers.

“I am pleased to confirm our plans for a direct listing in London. This process will broaden the ownership of Wise, in support of our mission to move money around the world faster, cheaper and more conveniently,” said Kristo Käärmann, CEO and co-founder of Wise, in a note in the statement. “Since announcing our expected intention to float last week, we’ve had over 60,000 expressions of interest in our customer shareholder programme, OwnWise, which is designed to reward customers who buy Wise shares and stick with us for the longer-term. This direct listing is about further aligning our mission and our shareholder base and I’m enormously proud that customers want to be a part of that.”

Wise has been one of the huge success stories for fintech coming out of Europe, and London — founded by Estonians Käärmann and Taavet Hinrikus, the company’s been based out of London and has stuck with that even through all the financial turmoil of Brexit. Its 10 million customers currently process around $7 billion (£5 billion) in cross-border transactions every month, which remains its primary business even as it diversifies into newer, related areas of financial services. In its most recent financial year, Wise’s revenue grew to $586 million, up from $422 million. That represents $57 million (£41 million) in profit before tax, and the company says it has been profitable since 2017.

Class B shares will hold 9 votes per share, are strictly non-transferable and, amongst other voting right cancellation events, expire on the fifth anniversary of any listing, the company confirmed. Wise’s shareholders and holders of vested options as at 23 May 2021 are entitled to elect to receive 50% of their class A share holding in the Company with additional corresponding class B shares on a 1:1 basis (save for Kristo Käärmann, CEO and co-founder of Wise, who is entitled to elect to receive 100% of his class A share holding in the Company with additional corresponding class B shares on a 1:1 basis), it added.

“The voting rights attaching to the class B shares are, subject to certain regulatory approvals, capped so that no shareholder can, by virtue of the class B shares they hold, cast more than one vote less than 35% of the eligible votes in respect of any shareholder decision (save for Kristo Käärmann who, for so long as he is CEO of the Company, will be capped in respect of his class B shares at one vote less than 50% of the eligible votes in respect of any shareholder decision and if, at any time, he is not CEO of the Company he will be capped at one below 35% of the eligible votes in respect of any shareholder decision). The class B shares are non-tradeable and will not be listed.”