Year: 2021

Semih Korkmaz and Hantz Févry launched Stoovo in 2019 as a way to help gig workers make the best use of their time.

Févry, who immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, knew first hand the struggles that come with part time work from his days as a student at Stonybrook University. While there bouncing from job to job, Févry would feel the sting associated with hidden fees, unkept promises, and variability of part-time labor.

The time at Stonybrook was also when Févry got his first taste of entrepreneurship. In 2010 and 2011 Févry said the Dean of the University’s business school let the budding business owner cut back on his hours so he could start iTrade International, an import-export business selling earthquake detection equipment in Haiti.

That first taste of tech and business development eventually landed Févry a job at Google in Hong Kong and offered him the chance to travel around the world. After a stint in Europe, Févry moved back to the U.S. where he set to work building Stoovo.

The question on his mind was this: How can we leverage technology to help gig workers or people taking short term assignments?

Févry and his co-founder Korkmaz envisioned Stoovo as a way to level they playing field by providing gig workers with information about the highest paying jobs available on the gig platforms at any one time. “What the platforms are doing is they are  optimizing to make sure that they’re responding to demand,” Févry said. “What we do is use the same approach to predict what will be the demand, where will be the demand, what will be the competition, and what’s the payout.”

The company’s software advises gig workers on the optimum time for using each service based on their earning criteria and hours, Févry said.

“We tell you when to start working, where you need to start working, and when you need to go when you need to take your break,” he said. 

But the company’s service isn’t only about optimization. There’s also a banking component and a suite of products to ensure that gig workers are also getting the most out of their gigs financially. The company offers a checking account, a tax management service, and lending services as well through services like BellBizzer, a Seattle-based company which offers a short-term rental service for consumer goods.

Both Korkmaz and Févry spent time working as delivery drivers or freelancing to get a feel for the challenges gig workers faced, Févry said. During lunch breaks at Google, Févry would do food deliveries to seewhat he could do so that he could understand how to make the gig economy work better.

Ultimately, the best solution would be to pay gig workers a fair wage for the time they spend doing their work, but barring that, technologically developed band-aids to help heal technologically enabled wounds seem like the only option.

Gig companies like Uber have a history of using their algorithms to wring more money from drivers — sometimes unbeknownst to the workers.

Back in August, a developer named Armin Samii created an app called UberCheats that monitored the UberEats application for a software bug to inform drivers if they were underpaid by the company for the distance they’d traveled to make a delivery. Last week, the app was taken down, but only because of a copyright infringement claim from Uber.

Stoovo and UberCheats seem to come from the same place. The idea is to equip workers with tools that can work for workers instead of for big platforms.

It’s this vision that attracted investors like Derek Norton from Watertower Ventures to invest in the company. To date, Stoovo has raised $2.4 million from investors including Watertower, 500 Startups, Plug and Play Ventures, and TSEF, Févry said.

With the money the company hopes to build out more products that can enable things like low-cost money transfers. Ultimately, the company just wants to give these gig workers a chance, Févry said.

“The gig economy is rife with frustrations,” Févry said, and Stoovo is making a pitch to smooth over the obstacles. “We really understand your life. We are also immigrants,” he said. “We know that of that $200… we know you have to send $40 overseas… We are building a product with [gig workers], we are not building for them.”

Semih Korkmaz and Hantz Févry launched Stoovo in 2019 as a way to help gig workers make the best use of their time.

Févry, who immigrated to the U.S. from Haiti, knew first hand the struggles that come with part time work from his days as a student at Stonybrook University. While there bouncing from job to job, Févry would feel the sting associated with hidden fees, unkept promises, and variability of part-time labor.

The time at Stonybrook was also when Févry got his first taste of entrepreneurship. In 2010 and 2011 Févry said the Dean of the University’s business school let the budding business owner cut back on his hours so he could start iTrade International, an import-export business selling earthquake detection equipment in Haiti.

That first taste of tech and business development eventually landed Févry a job at Google in Hong Kong and offered him the chance to travel around the world. After a stint in Europe, Févry moved back to the U.S. where he set to work building Stoovo.

The question on his mind was this: How can we leverage technology to help gig workers or people taking short term assignments?

Févry and his co-founder Korkmaz envisioned Stoovo as a way to level they playing field by providing gig workers with information about the highest paying jobs available on the gig platforms at any one time. “What the platforms are doing is they are  optimizing to make sure that they’re responding to demand,” Févry said. “What we do is use the same approach to predict what will be the demand, where will be the demand, what will be the competition, and what’s the payout.”

The company’s software advises gig workers on the optimum time for using each service based on their earning criteria and hours, Févry said.

“We tell you when to start working, where you need to start working, and when you need to go when you need to take your break,” he said. 

But the company’s service isn’t only about optimization. There’s also a banking component and a suite of products to ensure that gig workers are also getting the most out of their gigs financially. The company offers a checking account, a tax management service, and lending services as well through services like BellBizzer, a Seattle-based company which offers a short-term rental service for consumer goods.

Both Korkmaz and Févry spent time working as delivery drivers or freelancing to get a feel for the challenges gig workers faced, Févry said. During lunch breaks at Google, Févry would do food deliveries to seewhat he could do so that he could understand how to make the gig economy work better.

Ultimately, the best solution would be to pay gig workers a fair wage for the time they spend doing their work, but barring that, technologically developed band-aids to help heal technologically enabled wounds seem like the only option.

Gig companies like Uber have a history of using their algorithms to wring more money from drivers — sometimes unbeknownst to the workers.

Back in August, a developer named Armin Samii created an app called UberCheats that monitored the UberEats application for a software bug to inform drivers if they were underpaid by the company for the distance they’d traveled to make a delivery. Last week, the app was taken down, but only because of a copyright infringement claim from Uber.

Stoovo and UberCheats seem to come from the same place. The idea is to equip workers with tools that can work for workers instead of for big platforms.

It’s this vision that attracted investors like Derek Norton from Watertower Ventures to invest in the company. To date, Stoovo has raised $2.4 million from investors including Watertower, 500 Startups, Plug and Play Ventures, and TSEF, Févry said.

With the money the company hopes to build out more products that can enable things like low-cost money transfers. Ultimately, the company just wants to give these gig workers a chance, Févry said.

“The gig economy is rife with frustrations,” Févry said, and Stoovo is making a pitch to smooth over the obstacles. “We really understand your life. We are also immigrants,” he said. “We know that of that $200… we know you have to send $40 overseas… We are building a product with [gig workers], we are not building for them.”

On-demand grocery delivery platform Instacart has raises a $265 million funding ground from existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, D1 Capital Partners and others. The new funding, which, like its past few rounds, isn’t assigned a Series alphabetical designation, pushes the company’s valuation to $39 billion – more than double its $17.7 billion valuation when it raised is last financing, a $200 million venture round in October 2020.

What’s behind the massive increase in the value investors are willing to ascribe to the business? Put simply, the pandemic. Last year, Instacart announced three separate raises, including a $225 round in June, followed by a $100 million round in July. The rapid sequence of venture capital injections were likely designed to fuel growth as demand for grocery delivery services surged while people attempted to quarantine or generally spend less time frequenting high-traffic social environments like grocery stores.

In a blog post announcing the news, Instacart doesn’t put specifics on the growth rates of usage over the course of 2020, but it does express its intent to grow headcount by 50% in 2021, and continue to scale and invest in its advertising, marketing and enterprise efforts specifically in a quote.

On the product side, Instacart broadened its offerings from groceries to also include same-day delivery of a wide range of products, including prescription medicine, electronics, home decor, sport and exercise equipment and more. It’s capitalizing on the phenomenon of increased consumer spending during the pandemic, which is a reverse from what many anticipated given the impact the ongoing crisis has had on employment.

Instacart Chief Financial Officer Nick Giovanni said in a quote that the company expects this to be “a new normal” for shopping habits, and the size and pace of the company’s recent funding, as well as its ballooning valuation, seem to suggest its investors also don’t think this is a trend that will revert post-pandemic.

On-demand grocery delivery platform Instacart has raises a $265 million funding ground from existing investors, including Andreessen Horowitz, Sequoia Capital, D1 Capital Partners and others. The new funding, which, like its past few rounds, isn’t assigned a Series alphabetical designation, pushes the company’s valuation to $39 billion – more than double its $17.7 billion valuation when it raised is last financing, a $200 million venture round in October 2020.

What’s behind the massive increase in the value investors are willing to ascribe to the business? Put simply, the pandemic. Last year, Instacart announced three separate raises, including a $225 round in June, followed by a $100 million round in July. The rapid sequence of venture capital injections were likely designed to fuel growth as demand for grocery delivery services surged while people attempted to quarantine or generally spend less time frequenting high-traffic social environments like grocery stores.

In a blog post announcing the news, Instacart doesn’t put specifics on the growth rates of usage over the course of 2020, but it does express its intent to grow headcount by 50% in 2021, and continue to scale and invest in its advertising, marketing and enterprise efforts specifically in a quote.

On the product side, Instacart broadened its offerings from groceries to also include same-day delivery of a wide range of products, including prescription medicine, electronics, home decor, sport and exercise equipment and more. It’s capitalizing on the phenomenon of increased consumer spending during the pandemic, which is a reverse from what many anticipated given the impact the ongoing crisis has had on employment.

Instacart Chief Financial Officer Nick Giovanni said in a quote that the company expects this to be “a new normal” for shopping habits, and the size and pace of the company’s recent funding, as well as its ballooning valuation, seem to suggest its investors also don’t think this is a trend that will revert post-pandemic.

When a hacker broke into the computer systems of the Oldsmar Florida water supply last month, it sent up red flags across the operational tech world, whether that’s utilities or oil and gas pipelines. Xage, a security startup that has been building a solution to help protect these hard-to-secure operations, announced a Zero Trust remote access cloud solution today that could help prevent these kinds of attacks.

Duncan Greatwood, CEO at Xage, says flat out that if his company’s software was in place in Oldsmar, that hack wouldn’t have happened. Smaller operations like the one in Oldsmar tend to be one-person IT shops running older remote access software that’s vulnerable to hacking on a number of levels.

“It’s not difficult to compromise a virtual network computing (VNC) connection. It’s not difficult to compromise a stale account that’s been left on a jump box. What we started to do last year was deliver what we call a Zero Trust remote access solution to these kinds of customers,” Greatwood told me.

This involves controlling access device by device and person by person by determining who can do what based on them authenticating themselves and proving who they are. “It doesn’t rely on knowledge of a device password or a VPN zone password,” he explained.

The solution goes further with a secure traversal tunnel, which relies on a tamper proof certificate to prevent hackers from getting from the operations side of the house — whether that’s a utility grid, water supply or oil and gas pipeline — to the IT side where they could then begin to muck about with the operational technology.

Xage also uses a distributed ledger as a core part of its solution to help protect identity policies, logs and other key information across the platform. “Having a distributed ledger means that rather than an attacker having to compromise just a single node, it would have to compromise a majority of the nodes simultaneously, and that’s very difficult [if not impossible] to do,” he said.

What’s more, the ledgers operate independently across locations in a hierarchy with a global ledger that acts as the ultimate rules enforcer. That means even if a location goes offline, the rules will be enforced by the main system whenever it reconnects.

They introduced an on premise version of the Zero Trust remote access system last October, but with this kind of technology difficult to configure and maintain, some customers were looking for a managed solution like the one being introduced today. With the cloud solution, customers get a hosted solution accessible via a web browser with much faster deployment.

“What we’ve done with the cloud solution is made it really simple for people to adopt us by hosting the management software and the core Xage fabric nodes in this Xage cloud, and we’re really dramatically reducing that time to value for a remote access solution for IT,” Greatwood said.

You might be thinking that CISOs might not trust a cloud solution for these sensitive kinds of environments, and he admits that there is some caution in this market, even though they understand the benefits of moving to the cloud. To help ease these concerns, they can do a PoC in the cloud and there is a transfer tool to move back on prem easily if they are not comfortable with the cloud approach. So far he says that no early customers have chosen to do that, but the option is there.

Xage was founded in 2017 and has raised $16 million so far, according to Crunchbase data.

Insects are a lot of things – but fragile they’re not. Sure, most can’t withstand the full force of a human foot, but for their size, they’re evolve to be extremely rugged and resilient. Insect-sized technology, on the other hand, is general another story.

That’s certainly been the historic case with scaled-down drones. The components, in particular, tend to become more fragile the more you shrunk them. In particular, motors both lose efficiency and weaken the smaller they get.

Earlier models from the MIT lab have relied on rigid ceramic-based materials. They did the job in terms of getting the robot airborne, but as the lab notes, “foraging bumblebees endure a collision about once every second.” In other words, if you’re going to build something this small, you need to ensure that it doesn’t break down the first time it comes into contact with something.

“The challenge of building small aerial robots is immense,” says MIT Assistant Professor Kevin Yufeng Chen.

New drone models, which the lab describes as resembling, “a cassette tape with wings,” are built with soft actuators, made from carbon nanotube-coated rubber cylinders. The actuators elongate when electricity is applied at a rate up to 500 times a second. Doing this causes the wings to beat and the drones to take flight.

The drones are extremely light weight, as well, coming in at around 0.6 grams – basically as much as a big bumble bee. There are still limitations to these early models. Namely, the system currently requires them to be hardwired to deliver the necessary charge – as seen in the below gif. It can be a bit of a mess. Other modifications are being made, as well, including a more nature-inspired dragonfly shape being used for newer prototypes.

Image Credits: MIT

Should such the lab be able to to produce such a robot untethered with imaging capabilities and a decent sized battery, the potential applications are immense for the tiny drones. You’ve got everything from simple inspections currently being handled by larger models to pollination and search and rescue.

Fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic, digital transformation is happening all over the world. And Southeast Asia is no exception.

Indonesia’s Xendit, a startup focused on building digital payments infrastructure for the region, has just raised $64.6 million in a Series B led by Silicon Valley heavyweight Accel. The funding brings the total amount raised by the Jakarta-based company to $88 million since its 2015.

Notably, Y Combinator also participated in the financing. In fact, Xendit is the first Indonesian company to go through Y Combinator’s accelerator program. It also was ranked No. 64 on Y Combinator’s top 100 companies (by valuation and top exits) list in January 2021. 

Xendit works with businesses of all sizes, processing more than 65 million transactions with $6.5 billion in payment value annually. Its website promises businesses that “with a single integration,” they can accept payments in Indonesia and the Philippines. The company describes itself as building out financial services and digital payments infrastructure “in which the next generation of Southeast Asian SaaS companies can be built on top of,” or put more simply, it aspires to be the Stripe of Southeast Asia.

Xendit has been growing exponentially since its launch — with its CAGR (compound annual growth rate) increasing annually by 700%, according to COO and co-founder Tessa Wijaya. In 2020, the company saw its customer count increase by 540%. Customers include Traveloka, TransferWise, Wish and Grab, among others. Xendit declined to reveal hard revenue figures.

It also declined to reveal its current valuation but we do know that as of October 2019, it was valued at at least $150 million – a pre-requisite for appearing on this Y Combinator list, on which it ranked No. 53. 

The idea for Xendit was formed when CEO Moses Lo met his co-founders while studying at University of California, Berkeley. Shortly after, they went through Y Combinator, and launched Xendit in 2015. 

One of the company’s main benefactors was Twitch co-founder Justin Kan. According to Lo, “he happened to have some family in Indonesia, and it was also about the time when Asia was becoming more interesting for YC.”

Xendit was originally launched as a P2P payments platform before evolving into its current model.

Today, the startup aims to help businesses of all sizes seamlessly process online payments, run marketplaces, distribute payroll manage finances and detect fraud via machine learning. It aims for fast and easy integrations so that businesses can more easily accept payments digitally.

The market opportunity is there. One of the world’s most populous countries that is home to more than 270 million people — an estimated 175 million of which are internet users — Indonesia’s digital economy is expected to reach $300 billion by 2025.

Add to that a complex region that is home to 17,000 different islands and a number of regulatory and technological challenges.

“Trying to build the businesses of tomorrow on yesterday’s infrastructure is holding Southeast Asia’s businesses back,” Lo said.

The global shift toward more digital transactions over the past year led to increased demand for Xendit’s infrastructure and services, according to Wijaya. To meet that demand, the company doubled its employee headcount to over 350 currently.

The pandemic also led to Xendit branching out. Prior to 2020, many of the company’s customers were large travel companies. So the first few months of the year, the startup’s business was hit hard. But increased demand paved the way for Xendit to expand into new sectors, such as retail, gaming and other digital products.

Looking ahead, the startup plans to use its new capital to scale its digital payments infrastructure “quickly” with the goal of providing millions of small and medium-sized businesses across Southeast Asia with “an on-ramp to the digital economy.” It is also eyeing other markets. Xendit recently expanded into the Philippines and also is considering other countries in Southeast Asia, such as Thailand, Vietnam, Malaysia and Singapore, according to Wijaya.

Xendit is also similar in scope to San Francisco-based Finix, which aims to make every software company a payments company. Xendit acknowledges the similarities, but notes it is also “looking to tackle broader challenges related to accessibility, security and reliability that are unique to Southeast Asia,” with a deep understanding of the region’s unique geographical and cultural nuances.

To Accel partner Ryan Sweeney, Xendit has “quietly” built a modern digital payments infrastructure that’s transformed how Southeast Asian businesses transact.

“Their team’s combination of deep local expertise and global ambitions means they’re uniquely positioned to do what no other company could do in the region,” he said.

Volvo Cars said it will only make and sell all-electric vehicles by 2030, as part of a broader transformation of the automaker that will include shifting sales online.

“The key to sustainability is electrification, said Volvo Cars CEO Håkan Samuelsson during a presentation Tuesday. “Together with investments in charging infrastructure that is the right way to go and the course we have chosen at Volvo.”

The announcement was tied to the launch of the C40 Recharge, a low slung crossover based on the company’s CMA vehicle platform. While the C40 is the second vehicle under Volvo’s EV-focused Recharge brand, it is the first designed as pure electric only. All Volvo vehicles with fully electric and plug-in hybrid powertrains are housed under the Recharge brand. Like the XC40 Recharge, it will have an infotainment system powered by Google’s Android operating system as well as have the ability to make over-the-air software updates.

“It’s a car of firsts and it’s a car of the future,” CTO Henrik Green said, adding that the C40 will have two motors, a 78 kilowatt-hour battery and an estimated range of 420 km (260 miles) that will improve over time via software updates.

The company is well on its way to its electrification goal, according to Samuelsson, noting that last year one car out of three sold in Europe was a Recharge model, a chargeable plug-in hybrid.

Volvo, which is owned by China’s Geely Holdings, aims for 50% of its global sales to consist of fully electric cars, with the rest hybrids. By 2030, every car it sells should be fully electric, the company said.

Volvo’s evolution isn’t just pinned to the powertrain.

“The future customer offer cannot just consist of an electric car,” Samuelsson said. “We also need to listen to our consumers, and they expect transparency and a seamless experience getting and having a car.”

Volvo will only sell its all-electric vehicles online and at preset prices. Customers will be able to subscribe or buy the vehicles, which will comes with a customer care package. The vehicles will also have pre-selected configurations to shorten the time between ordering and receiving a vehicle.

Volvo Cars said it will only make and sell all-electric vehicles by 2030, as part of a broader transformation of the automaker that will include shifting sales online.

“The key to sustainability is electrification, said Volvo Cars CEO Håkan Samuelsson during a presentation Tuesday. “Together with investments in charging infrastructure that is the right way to go and the course we have chosen at Volvo.”

The announcement was tied to the launch of the C40 Recharge, a low slung crossover based on the company’s CMA vehicle platform. While the C40 is the second vehicle under Volvo’s EV-focused Recharge brand, it is the first designed as pure electric only. All Volvo vehicles with fully electric and plug-in hybrid powertrains are housed under the Recharge brand. Like the XC40 Recharge, it will have an infotainment system powered by Google’s Android operating system as well as have the ability to make over-the-air software updates.

“It’s a car of firsts and it’s a car of the future,” CTO Henrik Green said, adding that the C40 will have two motors, a 78 kilowatt-hour battery and an estimated range of 420 km (260 miles) that will improve over time via software updates.

The company is well on its way to its electrification goal, according to Samuelsson, noting that last year one car out of three sold in Europe was a Recharge model, a chargeable plug-in hybrid.

Volvo, which is owned by China’s Geely Holdings, aims for 50% of its global sales to consist of fully electric cars, with the rest hybrids. By 2030, every car it sells should be fully electric, the company said.

Volvo’s evolution isn’t just pinned to the powertrain.

“The future customer offer cannot just consist of an electric car,” Samuelsson said. “We also need to listen to our consumers, and they expect transparency and a seamless experience getting and having a car.”

Volvo will only sell its all-electric vehicles online and at preset prices. Customers will be able to subscribe or buy the vehicles, which will comes with a customer care package. The vehicles will also have pre-selected configurations to shorten the time between ordering and receiving a vehicle.

News aggregator Flipboard‘s local coverage is making what product lead Brian Gottesman described as a “quantum leap,” expanding from 60 topics (a.k.a. cities, towns and communities that you can follow) to more than 1,000.

While Flipboard has allowed users to follow stories focused on major cities like New York for years, it launched a broader initiative around local news at the beginning of last year. The company says it’s now bringing together news coverage in locations across the United States and Canada, including all 210 Designated Market Areas tracked by Nielsen.

This comes as local newspapers continue to struggle and shut down, creating what are known as news deserts. But Flipboard’s data quality analyst Marty Rose said that its local news sections don’t just rely on traditional newspapers — they can aggregate stories from travel blogs, publications aimed at diverse audiences, TV stations, regional/national publications that do stories of local interest and more.

“Our aggregation could create a local paper where in communities they don’t exist,” Gottesman added.

Flipboard is now tying these local topics to GPS locations, as well. Users will be asked to share their location with the app (Gottesman noted that to protect user privacy, Flipboard is only using “coarse precision” and doesn’t retain user location data), then presented with a list of nearby cities and local topics of interest that they can follow. This will allow them to keep up on everything from local political news to COVID-19 updates, weather forecasts and dining recommendations.

“This is such a key part of informing our users,” Gottesman said. “They need to know if there’s a natural disaster in their area … they need to know if there’s a new place to go and get vaccines. Their community is more important than ever.”

Conversely, Rose said that by building relationships with local news organizations, Flipboard could also “elevate” their coverage to non-local sections when it might be relevant to a broader audience.

Asked how publishers’ subscription strategies and paywalls might affect the stories that appear in these local topics, Rose acknowledged, “Some local publications do have paywalls. It’s entirely up to them, we have no problem with that whatsoever … We provide the headlines and if the user clicks through and they’re presented with some kind of paywall, it’s unfortunate for them, but it’s not really our call.”

At the same time, he said that local TV coverage isn’t paywalled, and that a growing number of local blogs and digital publications are relying on more of a donation or membership model: “I really hope that they stick around and we can push those a bit more.”