Year: 2021

G2 Venture Partners, a firm that spun out of Kleiner and Perkins Caufield & Byers, has raised $500 million to support entrepreneurs that aim to make existing industries more efficient, environmentally friendly and socially responsible.  

With Fund II, G2 is most bullish about technologies in transportation, logistics, manufacturing, agriculture and energy, with an increasing focus on sustainability, according to a spokesperson for the firm.

“The launch of our second fund expands our ability to work with companies that are moving the needle to redefine and revolutionize their respective industries,” said G2VP founding partner David Mount in a statement. “We will continue to partner with technology companies that are pushing the future of industry forward, driving economic growth with reduced resource intensity.” 

Investors in the new fund include Shell Ventures, Mitsui & Co., Daimler AG, ABB Switzerland Ltd. and The McKnight Foundation, a G2 spokesperson told TechCrunch. John Doerr, famed investor and VC at Kleiner, also personally invested in the fund. Doerr invested in G2VP’s initial $350 million fund back in 2018, and he’s known for delivering an emotional TED Talk in which he argued for increased investments in clean energy.

The firm has already led rounds in AVEVA-acquired industrial data management platform OSIsoft, Oracle-acquired utility customer engagement platform Opower and solar energy company Enphase. Kleiner led Enphase’s past fundraising rounds back in 2010, and in 2017, Doerr stepped back in to help the financially struggling company with another $10 million alongside T.J. Rodgers. G2 would not provide names of portfolio companies for this newest fund yet, but a spokesperson did say Fund II will be investing in a new set of companies. Any follow-on investments in companies from Fund I will be made out of that fund.

The firm invested in 15 late-stage companies in Fund I and expects to invest in a similar number of companies in Fund II. G2VC typically invests $10 million to $50 million in each company. Past portfolio companies include lidar manufacturer Luminar, EV tech company Proterra, computer vision solutions provider Scandit, autonomous robot company Seegrid and agricultural supply chain platform ProducePay, among others. 

“This team has consistently shown vision and taken action that is ahead of the curve on many aspects of the digital industrial transition the world is in the midst of,” said Robert Linck, chief investment officer of Shell Ventures, a limited partner in G2’s first and second funds, in a statement. “The brain trust at this firm will be a significant asset to the new generation of technology leaders and path breakers that is emerging today.”

Kai-Fu Lee’s Sinovation Ventures has its eyes on a niche market targeting software developers. In April, the venture capital fund led a $10 million angel round in Jingling, a Chinese startup developing Linux-based tablets and laptops, TechCrunch learned. Other investors in the round included private equity firm Trustbridge Partners.

Jingling was founded only in June 2020 but has quickly assembled a team of 80 employees hailing from the likes of Aliyun OS, Alibaba’s Linux distribution, Thunder Software, a Chinese operating system solution provider, and active participants in China’s open source community.

The majority of the startup’s staff are working on its Linux-based operating system called JingOS in Beijing, with the rest developing hardware in Shenzhen, where its supply chain is located.

“Operating systems are a highly worthwhile field for investment,” Peter Fang, a partner at Sinovation Ventures, told TechCrunch. “We’ve seen the best product iteration for work and entertainment through the combination of iPad Pro and Magical Keyboard, but no tablet maker has delivered a superior user experience for the Android system so far, so we decided to back JingOS.”

“The investment is also in line with Sinovation’s recognition and prediction in ARM powering more mobile and desktop devices in the future,” the investor added.

Jingling’s first device, the JingPad A1 tablet based on the ARM architecture, has already shipped over 500 units in a pre-sale and is ramping up interest through a crowdfunding campaign. Jingling currently uses processors from Tsinghua Unigroup but is looking into Qualcomm and MediaTek chipsets for future production, according to Liu.

On the software end, JingOS, which is open sourced on GitHub, has accumulated over 50,000 installs from users around the world, most of whom are in the United States and Europe.

But how many people want a Linux tablet or laptop? Liu Chengcheng, who launched Jingling with Zhu Rui, said the demand is big enough from the developer community to sustain the startup’s early-phase growth. Liu is known for founding China’s leading startup news site 36Kr and Zhu is an operating system expert and a veteran of Motorola and Lenovo.

Targeting the Linux community is step one for Jingling, for “it’s difficult to gain a foothold by starting out in the [general] consumer market,” said Liu.

“The Linux market is too small for tech giants but too hard for small startups to tackle… Aside from Jingling, Huawei is the only other company in China building a mobile operating system, but HarmonyOS focuses more on IoTs.”

Linux laptops have been around for years, but Jingling wanted to offer something different by offering both desktop and mobile experiences on one device. That’s why Jingling made JingOS compatible with both Linux desktop software like WPS Office and Terminal as well as the usual Android apps on smartphones. The JingPad A1 tablet comes with a detachable keyboard that immediately turns itself into a laptop, a setup similar to Apple’s Magic Keyboard for iPad.

“It’s a gift to programmers, who can use it to code in the Linux system but also use Android mobile apps on the run,” said Liu.

Jingling aspires to widen its user base and seize the Chromebook market about two from now, Liu said. The success of Chromebooks, which comprised 10.8% of the PC market in 2020 and increasingly ate into Microsoft’s dominance, is indicative of the slowing demand for Windows personal computers, the founder observed.

The JingPad A1 is sold at a starting price of $549, compared to Chrome’s wide price range roughly between $200 and $550 depending on the specs and hardware providers.

Self-expression for many consumers today comes in the form of social media and apps. But if you’re a larger business, even if you can’t ignore platforms like Facebook, a website still remains central part of your digital equation. Today, Duda — which has built a platform for larger businesses, and typically the agencies they employ, to build those websites — is announcing a round of growth funding of $50 million to expand its business.

This is a Series D, and it’s being led by Claridge IL with past investors Susquehanna Growth Equity and Vintage Investment Partners also participating. Itai Sadan, Duda’s CEO who co-founded the company with Amir Glatt, would not disclose the valuation, except to say that it has tripled since its last round. (It didn’t disclose then, either.) It has now raised $100 million and Sadan believes that the longer-term step will be an IPO in two or three years.

This latest round in the meantime is Duda’s biggest funding round to date, and it comes on the back of a predictably big year — one in which online presence for many became their only presence.

Duda has now crossed 1 million published websites from a community of 17,000 developers building on its platform. As a point of comparison, when we covered the company’s previous round — $25 million in September 2019 — Duda had crossed 560,000 websites and a community of 6,000 web professionals.

For some further context, these numbers may pale in comparison to WordPress overall, which today says it powers some 41% of the whole of the web (including, disclosure, TechCrunch.com itself) with tens of millions of websites created on its platform.

But Duda is not aiming to directly compete with all of WordPress, or SquareSpace, or Wix, or the wider field of web-building platforms: it describes itself as a “professional web site builder” and it specifically creates tools to handle not just large amounts of content, larger audiences, and larger processes (such as mass e-commerce transactions), but also a larger number of people who might need to engage with the site while it’s being constructed, and after it is built.

Having said that, in the area where it’s more directly competing — WordPress and others also provide tools to website building professionals and agencies — Sadan notes that some 60% of its customers are migrating from WordPress, according to the agencies that Duda has surveyed.

“The issues include security and, you know, plugins breaking,” he said. “The analogy I like to use is that it’s like Android versus iPhone,” he added, which to him means  “you get everything from one vendor: we do the hosting, provide a website builder, the templates, the widgets. And and you have a support team that you can actually call and talk to if you have any problems. That’s the guarantee that we give to our customers.” If the customer in question is an agency running tens or hundreds, or even thousands of sites, that is the kind of customer Duda handles.

The company’s more recent turn, he said, has been into SaaS: that is, websites that provide tools on their platforms that others in turn can use, whether those are travel planning tools, or e-commerce platforms, and so on. SaaS was an area Duda entered into back in 2019 and it now accounts for about half of its business, Sadan said.

Within, that, unsurprisingly, e-commerce has been one of the standout areas, growing 65% and now accounting for about 20% of all of Duda’s business. “Part of this raise is to double down on that,” he said.

“We look forward to partnering with Duda and its existing shareholders in further cementing Duda’s leadership in its space, as well as fulfilling its vision of making web design easy and scalable for web professionals serving clients across all industries,” said Oded Tal, Claridge IL’s founding managing partner, said in a statement. “The company has built an incredible product that is highly regarded by web professionals and operates in a truly massive, high growth market.”

Tests are king in many school systems and other educational environments: they are seen as an efficient way to assess what knowledge students have retained, and how well they do on a level playing field where everyone has the same exam to take.

Some, however, believe that system is flawed, and today a startup that’s built a platform to provide another way of assessing and teaching is announcing a big round of funding on the heels of strong growth for its approach.

Formative — a platform for K-12 teachers to provision assignments from other digital sources and learning platforms, assess how students handle them, help them based on those results, and then use progressive assignments to build a bigger picture and how that student is acquiring knowledge — has picked up $70 million, funding that it will be using to continue expanding the reach of its platform.

The funding is being led by Summit Partners previous investors Fika Ventures, Mac Ventures and Rethink Education also participating, among others. Formative is not disclosing its valuation but this is being described as a minority investment.

More significantly, it’s a major step up for the startup, which was founded in Santa Monica, CA, back in 2011 and had raised less than $7 million before now.

The funding however matches how well the startup has been doing. On the back of a major surge of interest in digital learning tools — spurred by the Covid-19 pandemic, the subsequent closure of physical schools, and a huge shift to remote learning — Formative says that its platform is already in the majority of U.S. school districts (specifically 92% of all U.S. school districts have at least one teacher signed up); that more than four million students have engaged with “Formatives” (as the assignments are casually called); and that it is delivering annual recurring revenue growth of around 700%.

And in keeping with that momentum, Formative has a lot of ambitious plans for the funding. They include building more analytical tools for teachers and administrators as well as parents and students; taking Formative to more international markets (it’s currently most active in English-speaking countries); and more generally (and perhaps most importantly) building technology that’s helping the system rethink what a quality education might look like, what form that should take.

“One of our big goals in the future is to really help be a gateway to evaluate the rigor and effectiveness of different curriculum streams,” said Craig Jones, the CEO who co-founded Formative with Kevin McFarland (the COO), in an interview. “We’re using all the data that we’ve collected, the billions of student responses to facilitate a bigger picture, insights on student learning, to the necessary stakeholders. That can spin off into a lot of different things that we can help our schools and teachers and parents use that data to ultimately drive additional learning.”

Jones and McFarland came up with the idea for Formative the startup while working on education PhDs at UCLA, where they were looking at how different pedagogic approaches might prove to work better than traditional methods for learning. Formative the startup takes its name from the idea of formative evaluation, where teachers provide regular, sustained assessment to check on students and modify how they are teaching to help them learn. In many ways it sits in opposition to an over-reliance on summative assessment, or the idea of wrapping up learning, and evaluating, based on a final test, although in practice even a shift to more formative can still help a student better prepare for those final summative assessments.

While the idea behind formative assessments has been around for a while, the breakthrough that Jones and McFarland had was to realize that the concept could be truly scaled and expanded if it was digitized, since that would enable efficient assignment delivery, and much more data collation, visualization, communication and analytics.

That concept, of course, took on a whole new profile in the last year and a half: schools and teachers that had already invested in the idea of using more digital tools, and possibly even Formative itself, ramped up their engagement; and they were joined by a new wave of educators scrambling to fill the big gap created by schools closing to slow down the spread of Covid-19, who might have previously had a very tenuous engagement with online learning. That had a big impact on a lot of the edtech sector, with online learning companies like Kahoot also seeing a big rise in use (and taking a bigger initiative into learning management by acquiring tools like Clever), as well as a plethora of other providers.

Formative too seized the moment and set up something it called the Covid-19 Assistance Program, providing free access to its platform — which is normally priced in different tiers, starting at free for a basic service, then increasing to $12 and $17 or ‘contact us’ based on numbers of teachers using the platform that allows for more integrations, more analytics and so on. Some 5,000 teachers and schools signed up for the free service, Jones said, and McFarland noted that as schools reopened, it’s continued through in what has definitely been an evolving engagement with technology for many in the classroom. (And not all are so quick to shift: my kids’ secondary school in London still strictly forbids people using “screens” at school and in classrooms.)

“There’s been a really big shift in the U.S., where there are more devices in classrooms now than there are students,” said McFarland, who said that many are taking a hybrid approach of saying, effectively, ‘If we want to utilize this, we can utilize it but not necessarily rely on it every single day.’

“That’s where you’ll see a lot of flexibility,” he continued. “They’re using a device, not a toy. We try to work a lot in that flexible hybrid environment.”

The approach it has taken is to make its system work in as seamless a way as possible for teachers, by not only integrating with all the learning materials that are “native” to digital platforms, but also making digitized versions of the most popular publications, and those that they are using as part of their curriculum, also something the teachers can call up and assign through Formative. In that regard, it’s not a learning content company, but more of a channel for making the content that is there, more accessible and more useful. It also links up with other tools like learning management systems when they are used to create a more efficient process overall.

That’s a model that has resonated with both educators and investors.

“Formative helps to accelerate learning for students, save time for teachers and quantify results for school and district administrators,” said Tom Jennings, an MD at Summit Partners, in a statement. “We believe Formative has a rare combination of rapid, capital-efficient growth, innovative products, delighted customers and a humble, mission-driven team. We admire how Craig, Kevin and the team have built the business and expect our partnership to help Formative accelerate product enhancements and the continued global expansion of the business.” Jennings is joining Formative’s board with this round.

Twitter is looking at adding new features that could help users who are facing abusive situations on its platform as a result of unwanted attention pile-ons, such as when a tweet goes viral for a reason they didn’t expect and a full firehose of counter tweets get blasted their way.

Racist abuse also remains a major problem on Twitter’s platform.

The social media giant says it’s toying with providing users with more controls over the @mention feature to help people “control unwanted attention” as privacy engineer, Dominic Camozzi, puts it.

The issue is that Twitter’s notification system will alert a user when they’ve been directly tagged in a tweet — drawing their attention to the contents. That’s great if the tweet is nice or interesting. But if the contents is abusive it’s a shortcut to scale hateful cyberbullying.

Twitter is badged these latest anti-abuse ideas as “early concepts” — and encouraging users to submit feedback as it considers what changes it might make.

Potential features it’s considering include letting users ‘unmention’ themselves — i.e. remove their name from another’s tweet so they’re no longer tagged in it (and any ongoing chatter around it won’t keep appearing in their mentions feed).

It’s also considering making an unmention action more powerful in instances where an account that a user doesn’t follow mentions them — by providing a special notification to “highlight potential unwanted situations”.

If the user then goes ahead and unmentions themselves Twitter envisages removing the ability of the tweet-composer to tag them again in future — which looks like it could be a strong tool against strangers who abuse @mentions. 

Twitter is also considering adding settings that would let users restrict certain accounts from mentioning them entirely. Which sounds like it would have come in pretty handy when president Trump was on the platform (assuming the setting could be deployed against public figures).

Twitter also says it’s looking at adding a switch that can be flipped to prevent anyone on the platform from @-ing you — for a period of one day; three days; or seven days. So basically a ‘total peace and quiet’ mode.

It says it wants to make changes in this area that can work together to help users by stopping “the situation from escalating further” — such as by providing users with notifications when they’re getting lots of mentions, combined with the ability to easily review the tweets in question and change their settings to shield themselves (e.g. by blocking all mentions for a day or longer).

The known problem of online troll armies coordinating targeted attacks against Twitter users means it can take disproportionate effort for the object of a hate pile-on to shield themselves from the abuse of so many strangers.

Individually blocking abusive accounts or muting specific tweets does not scale in instances when there may be hundreds — or even thousands — of accounts and tweets involved in the targeted abuse.

For now, it remains to be seen whether or not Twitter will move forward and implement the exact features it’s showing off via Camozzi’s thread.

A Twitter spokeswoman confirmed the concepts are “a design mock” and “still in the early stages of design and research”. But she added: “We’re excited about community feedback even at this early stage.”

The company will need to consider whether the proposed features might introduce wider complications on the service. (Such as, for example, what would happen to automatically scheduled tweets that include the Twitter handle of someone who subsequently flips the ‘block all mentions’ setting; does that prevent the tweet from going out entirely or just have it tweet out but without the person’s handle, potentially lacking core context?)

Nonetheless, those are small details and it’s very welcome that Twitter is looking at ways to expand the utility of the tools users can use to protect themselves from abuse — i.e. beyond the existing, still fairly blunt, anti-abuse features (like block, mute and report tweet).

Co-ordinated trolling attacks have, for years, been an unwanted ‘feature’ of Twitter’s platform and the company has frequently been criticized for not doing enough to prevent harassment and abuse.

The simple fact that Twitter is still looking for ways to provide users with better tools to prevent hate pile-ons — here in mid 2021 — is a tacit acknowledgment of its wider failure to clear abusers off its platform. Despite repeated calls for it to act.

A Google search for “* leaves Twitter after abuse” returns numerous examples of high profile Twitter users quitting the platform after feeling unable to deal with waves of abuse — several from this year alone (including a number of footballers targeted with racist tweets).

Other examples date back as long ago as 2013, underlining how Twitter has repeatedly failed to get a handle on its abuse problem, leaving users to suffer at the hands of trolls for well over a decade (or, well, just quit the service entirely).

One recent high profile exit was the model Chrissy Teigen — who had been a long time Twitter user, spending ten years on the platform — but who pulled the plug on her account in March, writing in her final tweets that she was “deeply bruised” and that the platform “no longer serves me positively as it serves me negatively”.

A number of soccer players in the UK have also been campaigning against racism on social media this year — organizing a boycott of services to amp up pressure on companies like Twitter to deal with racist abusers.

While public figures who use social media may be more likely to face higher levels of abusive online trolling than other types of users, it’s a problem that isn’t limited to users with a public profile. Racist abuse, for example, remains a general problem on Twitter. And the examples of celebrity users quitting over abuse that are visible via Google are certainly just the tip of the iceberg.

It goes without saying that it’s terrible for Twitter’s business if highly engaged users feel forced to abandon the service in despair.

The company knows it has a problem. As far back as 2018 it said it was looking for ways to improve “conversational health” on its platform — as well as, more recently, expanding its policies and enforcement around hateful and abusive tweets.

It has also added some strategic friction to try to nudge users to be more thoughtful and take some of the heat out of outrage cycles — such as encouraging users to read an article before directly retweeting it.

Perhaps most notably it has banned some high profile abusers of its service — including, at long last, president troll Trump himself earlier this year.

A number of other notorious trolls have also been booted over the years, although typically only after Twitter had allowed them to carry on coordinating abuse of others via its service, failing to promptly and vigorously enforce its policies against hateful conduct — letting the trolls get away with seeing how far they could push their luck — until the last.

By failing to get a proper handle on abusive use of its platform for so long, Twitter has created a toxic legacy out of its own mismanagement — one that continues to land it unwanted attention from high profile users who might otherwise be key ambassadors for its service.

Twitter is looking at adding new features that could help users who are facing abusive situations on its platform as a result of unwanted attention pile-ons, such as when a tweet goes viral for a reason they didn’t expect and a full firehose of counter tweets get blasted their way.

Racist abuse also remains a major problem on Twitter’s platform.

The social media giant says it’s toying with providing users with more controls over the @mention feature to help people “control unwanted attention” as privacy engineer, Dominic Camozzi, puts it.

The issue is that Twitter’s notification system will alert a user when they’ve been directly tagged in a tweet — drawing their attention to the contents. That’s great if the tweet is nice or interesting. But if the contents is abusive it’s a shortcut to scale hateful cyberbullying.

Twitter is badged these latest anti-abuse ideas as “early concepts” — and encouraging users to submit feedback as it considers what changes it might make.

Potential features it’s considering include letting users ‘unmention’ themselves — i.e. remove their name from another’s tweet so they’re no longer tagged in it (and any ongoing chatter around it won’t keep appearing in their mentions feed).

It’s also considering making an unmention action more powerful in instances where an account that a user doesn’t follow mentions them — by providing a special notification to “highlight potential unwanted situations”.

If the user then goes ahead and unmentions themselves Twitter envisages removing the ability of the tweet-composer to tag them again in future — which looks like it could be a strong tool against strangers who abuse @mentions. 

Twitter is also considering adding settings that would let users restrict certain accounts from mentioning them entirely. Which sounds like it would have come in pretty handy when president Trump was on the platform (assuming the setting could be deployed against public figures).

Twitter also says it’s looking at adding a switch that can be flipped to prevent anyone on the platform from @-ing you — for a period of one day; three days; or seven days. So basically a ‘total peace and quiet’ mode.

It says it wants to make changes in this area that can work together to help users by stopping “the situation from escalating further” — such as by providing users with notifications when they’re getting lots of mentions, combined with the ability to easily review the tweets in question and change their settings to shield themselves (e.g. by blocking all mentions for a day or longer).

The known problem of online troll armies coordinating targeted attacks against Twitter users means it can take disproportionate effort for the object of a hate pile-on to shield themselves from the abuse of so many strangers.

Individually blocking abusive accounts or muting specific tweets does not scale in instances when there may be hundreds — or even thousands — of accounts and tweets involved in the targeted abuse.

For now, it remains to be seen whether or not Twitter will move forward and implement the exact features it’s showing off via Camozzi’s thread.

A Twitter spokeswoman confirmed the concepts are “a design mock” and “still in the early stages of design and research”. But she added: “We’re excited about community feedback even at this early stage.”

The company will need to consider whether the proposed features might introduce wider complications on the service. (Such as, for example, what would happen to automatically scheduled tweets that include the Twitter handle of someone who subsequently flips the ‘block all mentions’ setting; does that prevent the tweet from going out entirely or just have it tweet out but without the person’s handle, potentially lacking core context?)

Nonetheless, those are small details and it’s very welcome that Twitter is looking at ways to expand the utility of the tools users can use to protect themselves from abuse — i.e. beyond the existing, still fairly blunt, anti-abuse features (like block, mute and report tweet).

Co-ordinated trolling attacks have, for years, been an unwanted ‘feature’ of Twitter’s platform and the company has frequently been criticized for not doing enough to prevent harassment and abuse.

The simple fact that Twitter is still looking for ways to provide users with better tools to prevent hate pile-ons — here in mid 2021 — is a tacit acknowledgment of its wider failure to clear abusers off its platform. Despite repeated calls for it to act.

A Google search for “* leaves Twitter after abuse” returns numerous examples of high profile Twitter users quitting the platform after feeling unable to deal with waves of abuse — several from this year alone (including a number of footballers targeted with racist tweets).

Other examples date back as long ago as 2013, underlining how Twitter has repeatedly failed to get a handle on its abuse problem, leaving users to suffer at the hands of trolls for well over a decade (or, well, just quit the service entirely).

One recent high profile exit was the model Chrissy Teigen — who had been a long time Twitter user, spending ten years on the platform — but who pulled the plug on her account in March, writing in her final tweets that she was “deeply bruised” and that the platform “no longer serves me positively as it serves me negatively”.

A number of soccer players in the UK have also been campaigning against racism on social media this year — organizing a boycott of services to amp up pressure on companies like Twitter to deal with racist abusers.

While public figures who use social media may be more likely to face higher levels of abusive online trolling than other types of users, it’s a problem that isn’t limited to users with a public profile. Racist abuse, for example, remains a general problem on Twitter. And the examples of celebrity users quitting over abuse that are visible via Google are certainly just the tip of the iceberg.

It goes without saying that it’s terrible for Twitter’s business if highly engaged users feel forced to abandon the service in despair.

The company knows it has a problem. As far back as 2018 it said it was looking for ways to improve “conversational health” on its platform — as well as, more recently, expanding its policies and enforcement around hateful and abusive tweets.

It has also added some strategic friction to try to nudge users to be more thoughtful and take some of the heat out of outrage cycles — such as encouraging users to read an article before directly retweeting it.

Perhaps most notably it has banned some high profile abusers of its service — including, at long last, president troll Trump himself earlier this year.

A number of other notorious trolls have also been booted over the years, although typically only after Twitter had allowed them to carry on coordinating abuse of others via its service, failing to promptly and vigorously enforce its policies against hateful conduct — letting the trolls get away with seeing how far they could push their luck — until the last.

By failing to get a proper handle on abusive use of its platform for so long, Twitter has created a toxic legacy out of its own mismanagement — one that continues to land it unwanted attention from high profile users who might otherwise be key ambassadors for its service.

Uber and Kia Europe are teaming up to offer drivers in 20 European markets deals on buying, leasing, financing or renting Kia’s e-Niro and e-Soul, the latest move by the ride-hailing giant to achieve its emissions goals. 

Uber has committed to being a zero-emission mobility platform across Europe by 2030, and hopes to get up to 30,000 Uber drivers into Kia’s BEV range by the same year. Kia is the latest in Uber’s collection of automakers offerings its drivers discounted rates on electric cars. In May, Uber also announced a partnership with EV manufacturer Arrival to create a purpose-built electric car for ride-hail drivers, and in September 2020, Uber partnered with GM to give Canadian and American drivers discounts to the all-electric Chevrolet Bolt. 

Recent legislation adopted by the European Union aims to cut carbon emissions by at least 55% by 2030, compared to 1990 levels. Uber’s partnership with Kia anticipates increasingly strict emissions regulations around the continent. To keep up, Uber is also targeting to have more than 100,000 electric vehicles across its European platform by 2025 and 50% of miles driven in Amsterdam, Berlin, Brussels, Lisbon, London, Madrid and Paris to be in zero-emissions vehicles. 

For its part, Kia hopes to use this partnership to popularize its BEVs as it prepares to launch 11 new electric models by 2026. The e-Niro crossover has 239 miles of range and a lithium-ion battery that charges in 54 minutes up to 80% on a DC fast charger. The e-Soul subcompact crossover, with a cute and boxy exterior, offers up to 243 miles of range on a full charge.

But even with the discounts, the Kia models that are currently on offer on PartnerPoint, Uber’s portal for London-based drivers shopping around for EVs, are still quite pricey. Kia is giving drivers a discount of around 8% on its vehicles to finance, as opposed to an average of 13% from Nissan and even 22% with Hyundai. That means Kia’s vehicles a cost between £29,877.40 ($42,15432) and £36,471.40 ($51,457.86), which is around the same price as, if not more than a London driver’s annual salary.

Despite this, it seems drivers are taking advantage of the discounts and other incentives, like 5% financing interest rates and the the Clean Air Fee, which collects 3 pence (4 cents) per ride to put towards the cost of an EV and has saved London drivers an average of £3,000 ($4,233), according to the company.

In London, more than 3.5 million trips have taken place in fully electric vehicles since the launch of the Clean Air Plan in 2019, according to Uber. Some 50% of new cars joining the platform in London are now fully electric, compared to 8% of new vehicles in wider markets. Over the past year, the number of EVs on Uber’s platform has jumped from 700 to 2,100, and Uber wants to double that by the end of the year. 

With this announcement, Uber also said it plans to continue expansion of Uber Green, which allows riders to request a lower emissions vehicle and drivers to get a reduced 15% service fee for each Uber Green trip, across Europe to 60 cities by the end of the year. This feature is currently only available for any London rider starting their trip inside Zone 1, but Uber says now is a good time for drivers to take advantage of lower running costs and greater earning potential through the program.

Uber drivers in Europe can find information about EV offers through the driver app, direct mail and driver webinars, the company said. Prices for vehicles won’t vary depending on driver location. 

 

With the gig economy came the need for ID verification, thus startups like OnFido (raised $188.8 million) appeared, alongside several others. But this sector is by no means ‘done’ yet.

Now, OCR Labs, which emerged from Australia, has announced a €12.5M / $15 million Series A funding round led by Turkish investors Oyak Group, to expand its services and team to the UK, Turkey and Europe. Halkin Ventures invested in its seed round. The startup specializes in digital ID verification, customer onboarding, identity fraud, and regulatory compliance.

OCR Labs, founded in 2018 by Daniel Aiello and Matthew Adams, says its technology uses “five proprietary technologies in one solution, including identity document optical character recognition (OCR), document fraud assessment, liveness detection, video fraud assessment, and face matching”. This supports AML and KYC regulations.

Daniel Aiello, Co-Founder, and CPO of OCR Labs, commented, “The need for digital verification is growing exponentially. This past year we’ve seen more demand from new sectors as they try to navigate the pandemic and an inability to operate in person…No one wants to spend hours trying to prove who they are, whether it’s for a job or for a bank account, and we also want to know we’re protected against identity theft and fraud. Digital ID verification has a key role to play, but this year we’ve also seen the limitations if hybrid models are used. People are a barrier and a risk, but fully automated technology can have a huge impact on many industries and privacy. OCR Labs is built to be secure, frictionless and fast, and capable of recognizing ID documents the world over.”

OCR Labs is used by recruitment business REED in the UK. Russ Cohn, an early member of the Google UK leadership team, has been appointed OCR’s General Manager of International Operations, based out of London.

Cohn commented: “The technology that Matt and Dan have created is completely automated, so it doesn’t rely on any humans behind the scenes. That’s very key at the moment. We’ve seen how COVID has impacted having that hybrid solution, so automation increases the speed and delivery of the technology to our users… A lot of competitors outsource and use different vendors to put together a solution.”

With the gig economy came the need for ID verification, thus startups like OnFido (raised $188.8 million) appeared, alongside several others. But this sector is by no means ‘done’ yet.

Now, OCR Labs, which emerged from Australia, has announced a €12.5M / $15 million Series A funding round led by Turkish investors Oyak Group, to expand its services and team to the UK, Turkey and Europe. Halkin Ventures invested in its seed round. The startup specializes in digital ID verification, customer onboarding, identity fraud, and regulatory compliance.

OCR Labs, founded in 2018 by Daniel Aiello and Matthew Adams, says its technology uses “five proprietary technologies in one solution, including identity document optical character recognition (OCR), document fraud assessment, liveness detection, video fraud assessment, and face matching”. This supports AML and KYC regulations.

Daniel Aiello, Co-Founder, and CPO of OCR Labs, commented, “The need for digital verification is growing exponentially. This past year we’ve seen more demand from new sectors as they try to navigate the pandemic and an inability to operate in person…No one wants to spend hours trying to prove who they are, whether it’s for a job or for a bank account, and we also want to know we’re protected against identity theft and fraud. Digital ID verification has a key role to play, but this year we’ve also seen the limitations if hybrid models are used. People are a barrier and a risk, but fully automated technology can have a huge impact on many industries and privacy. OCR Labs is built to be secure, frictionless and fast, and capable of recognizing ID documents the world over.”

OCR Labs is used by recruitment business REED in the UK. Russ Cohn, an early member of the Google UK leadership team, has been appointed OCR’s General Manager of International Operations, based out of London.

Cohn commented: “The technology that Matt and Dan have created is completely automated, so it doesn’t rely on any humans behind the scenes. That’s very key at the moment. We’ve seen how COVID has impacted having that hybrid solution, so automation increases the speed and delivery of the technology to our users… A lot of competitors outsource and use different vendors to put together a solution.”

Despite the pandemic’s economic impact, Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem has proven to be very resilient. In fact, a new report from investment firm Golden Gate Ventures predicts a record number of exits will happen in the region over the next couple of years, thanks to factors like a maturing ecosystem, more secondary buyers and the emergence of SPACs.

The firm’s comprehensive “Southeast Asia Exit Landscape Report 2.0,” is a followup to a previous report published in 2019.

Here are some highlights from the latest report, along with additional insight from Golden Gate Ventures partner Michael Lints, its lead author. For both reports, Golden Gate Ventures partnered with business school INSEAD to survey general and limited partners in the region. It also draws on Golden Gate Ventures’ proprietary database, which dates back to 2012 and tracks information like the time between funding rounds and fundraising success rates, as well as public databases, reports and expert commentary from the New York Stock Exchange.

The overall exit landscape

Despite the pandemic’s economic impact, tech proved to be resilient globally (for example, there were a number of initial public offers in the United States at record prices). While Southeast Asia’s tech ecosystem is relatively younger, Lints told TechCrunch its resiliency was driven by companies founded years ago that suddenly saw an increase in demand for their services because of the pandemic.

“We’ve built infrastructure over the past eight to nine years, when it comes to e-commerce, logistics, some on the healthcare side as well, and when the pandemic happened, people were suddenly stuck at home,” Lints said. He added “If you look at the pickup for most of the e-commerce companies, they at least doubled their revenue. For last-mile logistics companies, they’ve increased their revenue. There was a lot of pickup on the digital healthcare side as well.”

While tech fared well compare to many other industries, one downside was that the COVID-19 pandemic caused overall global venture capital investment to decline. Southeast Asia’s startup ecosystem was not immune, and had less exits, but it still did relatively well, with $8.2 billion invested in 2020, according to a report by Cento Ventures and Tech In Asia.

It’s important to note that more than half of that funding was raised in very large rounds by unicorns like Grab, Go-jek and Traveloka, but Cento Ventures found there was also an increase in investments between $50 million to $100 million for other startups. These are usually Series B and C rounds, which Golden Gate Ventures says creates a strong pipeline for potential exits over the next three to four years.

“If you go back even just two years, the amount of B rounds that are happening now, I’ve never seen that number before. It’s a definite increase,” said Lints.

Investments are also continuing to flow into Southeast Asia. According to the report, there was $6 billion of funding in just the first quarter of 2021 (based on data from DealStreet Asia, PWC and Genesis Ventures), making it the strongest start to a year in the region’s history.

This bodes well for the possibility of mergers and acquisitions in 2021. The report found that there were less exits in 2019 and 2020 than in 2018, but not just because of the pandemic—many startups wanted to remain venture-backed for longer. Golden Gate Ventures expects M&A activity will pick up again. In 2021, it forecasts acquisition deals worth more than $30 million, large mergers and an increase in SPACs.

What’s in the pipeline

Golden Gate Ventures predicts that a total of 468 startup exits will happen between 2020 and 2022, compared to the 412 forecast in the previous edition of its report. This is due to more late-stage private equity investors, including secondary buyers, SPACs and a welcoming public market.

Lints said secondary buyers will include a mix of family offices, conglomerates and venture funds that want a higher allocation in a company or to pre-empt a forthcoming round.

“What I think is interesting is some of the later-stage funds, so private equity funds, and not only ones that are in Southeast Asia, but even foreign ones, are now looking to get a position in companies that they assume will be able to raise a Series D or Series E over the next few years. That’s something I haven’t seen before, it’s relatively new in the market,” he added.

Golden Gate Ventures expects M&A activity to continue being the main way Southeast Asian startups exit, potentially accounting for up to 80% of deals, followed by secondary sales (15%) and IPOs (5%).

In fact, there was a record number of M&A deals in 2020, despite the pandemic. Golden Gate Ventures estimates that 45 deals happened, especially in e-commerce, fintech, media, adtech and social networking, as larger companies acquired startups to grow their tech stacks.

More companies going public will create a cascading effect through Southeast Asia’s ecosystem. The report forecasts that companies like Gojek and Trax, who have already made several high-profile acquisitions, will continue buying startups if they list publicly and have more liquidity.

Series B and C deals

While there will be more exits, there are also more opportunities for companies to raise larger later-stage rounds to stay private, if they want to—a sign of Southeast Asia’s maturing ecosystem, said Lints.

As the pandemic unfolded in 2020, the number of pre-seed and seed deals fell. On the other hand, the report found that it became quicker for startups to raise Series B or C rounds, or less than 21 months on average.

“If you look at typical exits between 2015 to 2017, you could argue that some of those exits might have been too early because the company was still in a growth trajectory, but there was hardly any follow-on funding for them to expand to a new country, for instance, or build out a new product,” said Lints. “So their only revenue to raise money was to be acquired by a larger company so they could keep building the product.”

“I think now you’re able to raise that Series C round, which allows you to expand the company and stay private, as opposed to having to drive towards an exit,” he added. “I think that shows the maturity of the ecosystem now and, again, it’s a huge advantage because founders have these amazing things they want to build, and now actually have the capital to do so and to really try to compete, and that has definitely been a big change.”

Another good thing is that the increase in later-stage funding does not appear to be creating a pre-seed and seed funding gap. This is partly because early employees from mature companies that have raised massive rounds often branch out and become founders themselves. As they launch startups, they have the benefit of being familiar with how fundraising works and a network. For example, a significant number of alumni from Grab, Gojek and Lazada have gone on to found companies.

“They seem to be raising a lot faster, and I think the second thing that’s happening across the board is we’re seeing more scouts putting really early checks into companies,” said Lints. “My assumption is if you look at the Series A pipeline, which is still pretty long, that has to come from a large number of pre-seed and seed deals.”

Funds want to cash out

Another factor that may drive an increase in exits—especially M&A deals—are funds that have reached the point where they want to cash out. Golden Gate Ventures’ 2019 report forecast that the first batch of institutional venture funds launched in 2010 to 2012 will start reaching the end of their lifecycle in 2020. This means the general partners of these funds are exploring exit opportunities for their portfolios, leading to an increase in secondary and M&A deals.

This in turn will increase the number of secondary markets, which have typically been low in Southeast Asia. The original investors won’t necessarily push for portfolio companies to sell themselves, but instead look at secondary buyers who might be keen on mergers and M&A deals.

“The thing we’ve seen over the last 18 months is there’s been a larger pickup in the secondary markets, where later-stage investors, in some cases family-owned businesses or family offices, are looking to get access to deals that were started eight, nine or 10 years ago. You’ll see the cap tables of these companies change, and that does mean the founders will have different shareholders,” said Lints.

“These are typically for companies that are performing well, where you can foresee that they will be able to fundraise within the next 12 months. For the ones that are in a more difficult position, I think it’s going to be tricky,” he added. “When you have a portfolio of companies as a fund, that doesn’t necessarily mean that you can sell all 20 of them, so I think for some founders, the impact will be that they will need to make a decision to continue the business and buy back the shares their investors are holding, or are they going to liquidate the business or look for a trade sale.”

SPAC opportunities

The biggest SPAC news in Southeast Asia was Grab’s announcement it will go public in the United States following a $40 billion SPAC deal. Lints expects more Southeast Asian companies to take the SPAC route when going public. Not only does the process give them more flexibility, but for startups that want to list in the U.S., working with a SPAC can help them.

“My guess is with New York allowing direct listings, I think more and more people will shy away from the traditional IPO route and look at what is the fastest and most flexible way to list on a stock exchange. For Southeast Asia, listing has never been easy, so I think SPACs will definitely open the floodgates,” said Lints.

Barriers not only include regulatory filings, pre-IPO roadshows and high costs, but also “concern whether the international retail investor or public markets actually understand these companies in Southeast Asia,” he added. “If you have a very strong sponsor team that is running the SPAC, they can be super helpful in positioning the company, doing the marketing and getting interest from the market as well.”

Both the Singapore Exchange and Indonesian Stock Exchange are preparing to allow SPACs in an effort to attract more tech listings.

Lints said this will allow companies to consider a dual listing in Southeast Asia and the U.S. for larger returns. “A dual listing would be an amazing option and I think through the avenue of SPACs, that makes a lot of sense.”