Year: 2021

French startup Pennylane has raised $18.4 million (€15 million) for its accounting service that combines automated processes with human accountants. Existing investors Global Founders Capital and Partech are investing once again.

Pennylane is both a software-as-a-service company that helps you deal with your financial data and an accounting firm. By working with accountants directly, it means that you can talk with your accountant through the company’s platform. It becomes a single source of information for financial data.

The startup wants to improve the experience for both its clients and its accountants. Usually, accounting firms receive data every month or every quarter. They waste a ton of time opening files and entering information in accounting software.

Similarly, accounting reports are a black box for CEOs and CFOs. They can’t leverage that data for financial projections and visibility. Pennylane wants to change that so that you don’t have to use Excel to predict your company’s P&L.

When you first start working with Pennylane, you connect your account with third-party services that already hold valuable information, such as Stripe, Payfit, Qonto, Zoho, Sellsy, etc. This way, information is always up to date, and not just when you manually export data from all your services.

A year after launch, Pennylane has generated €2 million in revenue ($2.5 million) and attracted 550 customers. There are now 30 accountants working for the company.

Up next, the startup wants to attract more companies, and especially companies that have an in-house accounting team or work with an accounting firm already. You’ll be able to use Pennylane’s software-as-a-service with your own accountant.

Pennylane had previously raised a $4.3 million (€4 million) seed round with Global Founders Capital, Partech and Kima Ventures.

IPRally, a burgeoning startup out of Finland aiming to solve the patent search problem, has raised €2 million in seed funding.

Leading the round is by JOIN Capital, and Spintop Ventures, with participation from existing pre-seed backer Icebreaker VC. It brings the total raised by the 2018-founded company to €2.35 million.

Co-founded by CEO Sakari Arvela, who has 15 years experience as a patent attorney, IPRally has built a knowledge graph to help machines better understand the technical details of patents and to enable humans to more efficiently trawl through existing patients. The premise is that a graph-based approach is more suited to patent search than simple keywords or freeform text search.

That’s because, argues Arvela, every patent publication can be distilled down to a simpler knowledge graph that “resonates” with the way IP professionals think and is infinitely more machine readable.

“We founded IPRally in April 2018, after one year of bootstrapping and proof-of-concepting with my co-founder and CTO Juho Kallio,” he tells me. “Before that, I had digested the graph approach myself for about two years and collected the courage to start the venture”.

Arvela says patent search is a hard problem to solve since it involves both deep understanding of technology and the capability to compare different technologies in detail.

“This is why this has been done almost entirely manually for as long as the patent system has existed. Even the most recent out-of-the-box machine learning models are way too inaccurate to solve the problem. This is why we have developed a specific ML model for the patent domain that reflects the way human professionals approach the search task and make the problem sensible for the computers too”.

That approach appears to be paying off, with IPRally already being used by customers such as Spotify and ABB, as well as intellectual property offices. Target customers are described as any corporation that actively protects its own R&D with patents and has to navigate the IPR landscape of competitors.

Meanwhile, IPRally is not without its own competition. Arvela cites industry giants like Clarivate and Questel that dominate the market with traditional keyword search engines.

In addition, there are a few other AI-based startups, like Amplified and IPScreener. “IPRally’s graph approach makes the searches much more accurate, allows detail-level computer analysis, and offer a non-black-box solution that is explainable for and controllable by the user,” he adds.

Snapchat locked President Donald Trump’s account after pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol. A Snap spokesperson confirmed to TechCrunch that the action was taken on Wednesday and added that the company will monitor the situation closely before re-evaluating its decision.

This is not the first time Snap has taken action against Trump’s account over concerns about dangerous rhetoric from the president. In June, it announced content from Trump’s Snapchat would no longer be promoted in its Discover tab, and would only be visible to users if they subscribe to or search for it.

In a blog post published shortly before Snap announced its decision, co-founder and chief executive officer Evan Spiegel said that Snapchat “simply cannot promote accounts in America that are linked to people who incite racial violence, whether they do so on or off our platform.”

Unlike many other social media platforms, Snapchat was created for users to communicate with friends instead of a wider audience, the Snap spokesperson said. It has focused on making it harder to spread misinformation by relying on moderated and vetted content. For example, the Discover tab only features content from editorial partners like Reuters and other news organizations.

Twitter also locked Trump out of his account after forcing the removal of three tweets, but that action may last for only twelve hours. Facebook and Instagram locked Trump out of posting for 24 hours and blocked the #StormTheCapitol hashtag.

Many activists are calling for Twitter and Facebook to make their bans permanent, with ethics organization Accountable Tech tweeting that “the violent assault on the Capitol today has been heartbreaking, but not entirely unexpected. Sadly, Twitter and Facebook’s preparedness and response has been wildly inadequate. Simply labeling incitements of violence is not enough.”

The State Department ordered diplomats to stop posting on social media after pro-Trump rioters stormed the United States Capitol, reports CNN, citing three diplomatic sources. Diplomats overseas were also told by the under secretary for public affairs to remove scheduled content for Facebook, Hootsuite and Twitter until told otherwise, and that planned social media posts from the State Department’s main accounts were also being suspended.

According to CNN, diplomats are usually only told to pause social media posts after a terrorist attack or major natural disaster.

As of late Wednesday evening in the United States, the main State Department Twitter account had only retweeted a thread by Secretary of State MIchael Pompeo in which he said “the storming of the U.S. Capitol today is unacceptable.”

So far, the official Instagram accounts of the State Department’s Instagram and Pompeo and the State Department’s YouTube have made no posts after the rioting at the Capitol, while the State Department’s Facebook page has a post repeating Pompeo’s Twitter thread.

TechCrunch has contacted the State Department for comment.

Social media platforms scrambled to react after an extraordinary and terrifying day of violence that resulted in the deaths of four people. Rioters breached the Capitol early Wednesday afternoon, as electoral votes were being counted, forcing lawmakers to evacuate (the joint session was later reconvened).

On Wednesday afternoon, Twitter required the removal of three of President Donald Trump’s tweets and locked his account for twelve hours, before stating that he would be permanently suspended for future violations of its Civic Integrity policy. Facebook and Instagram announced that the president would barred from posting to his accounts for 24 hours and began blocking content posted to the #StormTheCapitol hashtag.

It was hard not to feel emotional today, as the world watched for more than four hours as rioters stormed into and throughout the Capitol building in Washington to disrupt the certification of the election win of incoming U.S. President-Elect Joe Biden. They’d been encouraged earlier in the afternoon by outgoing President Donald Trump himself to head to the building and protest what he falsely claimed yet again was an stolen election, a lie he began to spread the evening of the U.S. election in November.

While members of Congress called on him to make a statement rebuking the rioters’ actions from their undisclosed locations, he instead encouraged his supporters over Twitter, writing that “These are the things and events that happen when a sacred landslide election victory is so unceremoniously & viciously stripped away from great patriots” and later posting a video in which repeated his lies about a “landslide election that was stolen from us.”

It was the first time in American history that supporters of the losing presidential candidate forcibly disrupted the official counting of electoral votes, as noted earlier in the evening by PBS. And while Trump’s tweets were later deleted by Twitter for “repeated and severe violations of our Civic Integrity policy,” the move was viewed by many as too little and too late, including by Silicon Valley investors. Indeed, while many are already open about their political views, many today let loose their fury toward the outgoing administration and those who have enabled it.

So many of us have held off on this post in the name of balance and decency. If you still support Trump after this, FUCK YOU and never talk to me again.

— Ryan Sarver (@rsarver) January 6, 2021

What’s happening in DC is a terrorist attack on the US gov & should be dealt w/ as such

One warning to stand down, then head shot

The deference to white domestic terrorist orgs is appalling & must end

If black folks were assaulting the Capitol, there’d be helicopter gunships

— Matt Ocko (@mattocko) January 6, 2021

I’m sorry Hawley, I can’t hear you over the first pump to the MAGA crowd earlier. Sit the fuck down. (Nice double mask by Romney though!)

— M.G. Siegler (@mgsiegler) January 7, 2021

A lingering question is whether the day — one on which a dozen Senate Republicans and dozens more Republican House members had planned to object to the certification of the election results — will begin to polarize people further or whether, following Trump’s ignominious final days, some of that fury begins to subside instead.

It’s far too soon to know of course, but some investors, at least, say their anger has far more to do with basic human decency, which seemed frequently to take a backseat during the Trump administration.

For her part, Deena Shakir of Lux Capital used to work for the Obama administration and long made her political perspective transparent on Twitter. But she says of today that the “events are not about politics. What we have witnessed is an affront to democracy, an assault on American history, and a gruesome reflection of the divided nation we live in.

Hunter Walk — a cofounder of the venture firm Homebrew and Twitter funnyman who today tweeted, “don’t be putting [Trump son-in-law and White House advisor] Jared Kushner on cap tables when this is all said and done” — echoes the sentiment, saying: “I’m not afraid to have a strong public voice on issues I consider to be urgent and essential human rights questions.”

As for whether the day would make it any harder to fund or partner with a team that supported Trump’s ascendency, Walk says, “We fund wonderful entrepreneurs and employ no purity tests on whether they agree with us 100%. I’m certain we’ve backed people who sit to our political left and to our political right – that’s not an issue for us and not an issue for them.”

To the extent that Walk’s clearly Democratic public stance may turn off some talented founders who disagree with him or prefer that he shut up and write a check, that’s ok, too, says Walk. “We don’t believe we need to compromise our values in order to be successful.”

Shakir meanwhile suggests that she doesn’t always have the luxury of tuning out politics entirely.

For one thing, she considers those who terrorized the nation’s capital today “angered perpetrators of a jingoistic, supremacist ideology that is not only normalized but actually incited by the highest branch of our government and amplified via social media.”

More, she notes, “Given my focus on healthcare, so much of my own thesis development and so many of my conversations have inevitably been informed by the pandemic, which—for better or worse—has become politicized.”

Try as she might to bifurcate politics from work, it’s futile right now, she says. “These events and policies inform our present and our future, affect the markets that value our companies, and contribute to trends and white spaces. And today, they reflect our values as a nation and as human beings.”

Eat Just, a food startup from San Francisco making chicken-less eggs, has ambitions to crack the Chinese market where consumer appetite for plant-based food is growing and other Western vegan substitute brands like Beyond became available in recent quarters.

The startup said this week it will be suppling to fast-food chain Dicos, a local rival to McDonald’s and KFC in China. The agreement will see Eat Just add its plant-based eggs to the restaurant’s breakfast items across more than 500 locations. The eggs are derived from a legume called mung beans, which have long been a popular ingredient for soup, noodles and dessert in China.

At Dicos in major Chinese cities, consumers will find Eat Just eggs in breakfast burgers, bagel sandwiches and Western-style breakfast plates. That diversifies the Dicos plant-based menu which already includes a vegan chicken burger supplied by local startup Starfield. Dicos also offers a gateway into China’s low-tier cities where it has built a stronghold and can potentially help evangelize plant-based proteins in communities beyond China’s urban yuppies. The chain operates a total of 2,600 stores in China and serves 600 million customers a year.

Eat Just first entered China in 2019 and currently generates less than 5% of its revenue from the country, Andrew Noyes, head of global communications at Eat Just, told TechCrunch. But over time, the company expects China to account for more than half of its revenue. Ten of its 160 employees are based in China.

Eat Just’s vegan egg recipe / Photo: Eat Just

“We have been intentional about starting small, going slow and hiring people who know the market and understand how to build a sustainable business there. We’ve also been focused on finding the right partners to work with on downstream manufacturing, sales and distribution, and that work continues,” said Noyes.

The partnership with Dicos arrived on the heels of Eat Just’s announcement to set up an Asia subsidiary. The nine-year-old company, formerly Hampton Creek, has raised over $300 million from prominent investors including Li Ka-Shing, Peter Thiel, Bill Gates and Khosla Ventures. It was last valued at $1.2 billion.

Before its tie-up with Dicos, Eat Just had already been selling online in China through Alibaba and JD.com among other retail channels. Its China business is currently growing by 70% year-over-year.

While there’s no shortage of strong competition in the plant-based food race in China, Eat Just claims it’s taken a unique angle by zeroing in on eggs.

“Plant-based meat companies offer products that pair deliciously with Just Egg,” the brand name of the startup’s main product, Noyes noted.

“Plant-based foods are increasing in popularity among Chinese consumers and more sustainable eating is becoming part of a national dialogue about the feeding of the country in the future. China produces about 435 billion eggs per year and demand for protein is increasing.”

Indeed, Euromonitor predicted that China, the world’s largest meat-consuming country, would see its “free from meat” market size grow to $12 billion by 2023, compared to $10 billion in 2018.

After removing a video in which President Trump praised a violent group of his supporters who broke into the U.S. Capitol building, Facebook is rolling out a new set of rules in response to the day’s shocking events.

Facebook says that the group of people who rushed into the Capitol Wednesday now fall under the company’s policies on “dangerous individuals and organizations” — a designation it uses to enforce rules against terrorists, mass murderers and violent hate groups. Last June, the company added the anti-government “boogaloo” movement, which encourages its adherents to take up arms and prepare for or incite a civil war, to the same list.

“The violent protests in the Capitol today are a disgrace,” a Facebook spokesperson told TechCrunch.

In a blog post, Facebook VP of Integrity Guy Rosen and VP of Global Policy Management Monika Bickert called Wednesday’s events an “emergency” for the platform:

“Let us speak for the leadership team in saying what so many of us are feeling. We are appalled by the violence at the Capitol today. We are treating these events as an emergency. Our Elections Operations Center has already been active in anticipation of the Georgia elections and the vote by Congress to certify the election, and we are monitoring activity on our platform in real time.”

Facebook says that it is in the process of removing content praising the Trump supporters who infiltrated the U.S. Capitol as well as any other “incitement or encouragement” of Wednesday’s events, including photos and videos from the individuals’ perspectives. “At this point they represent promotion of criminal activity which violates our policies,” Rosen and Bickert wrote.

The company will also crack down on anyone organizing any kind of protest that violates Washington D.C.’s newly implemented curfew, even peaceful gatherings. Any “attempts to restage violence” will also be removed.

Facebook says that it is also scouring the platform for any posts calling for people to bring weapons to a location “not just in Washington but anywhere in the US — including protests.”

Facebook also made a few tweaks to “emergency measures” it put in place for the U.S. election, including requiring additional admin review for group posts and auto-disabling comments on group posts that attract a “high rate” of hate speech or encouragement of violence.

Facebook’s blog post also mentions previous crackdowns on militias, the Proud Boys and the “violence-inducing” QAnon conspiracy. Each group connected and grew on Facebook before eventually eventually being booted from the platform and all three had a presence at Wednesday’s violent attempt to overthrow the U.S. election results.

Today’s historic and terrifying coup attempt by pro-Trump extremists in Washington, D.C. played out live the same way it was fomented — on social media. Once again Twitter, streaming sites, and other user-generated media were the only place to learn what was happening in the nation’s capital — and the best place to be misled by misinformation and propaganda.

In the morning, official streams and posts portended what people expected of the day: a drawn-out elector certification process in Congress while a Trump-led rally turned to general protests. But when extremists gathered at the steps of the U.S. Capitol building, the country watched isolated flare-ups between them and police turn into a full-blown violent invasion of several federal buildings, including where Congress was holding a joint session.

Network news and mainstream sources struggled to keep up as people on both sides documented the chaos that followed. As extremists pushed into the outlying buildings, then the rotunda, then the House and Senate chambers, everyone from White House press pool reporters to political aides and elected officials from both parties live-tweeted and streamed the events as they happened.

Videos of outnumbered security guards retreating from mobs or trading blows were seen by millions, who no doubt could barely believe it was really occurring. Meanwhile, reports propagated from around the country as smaller invasions of government buildings took place.

On one hand, it further demonstrated the power of social media to serve as a distributed, real-time aggregator of important information. It is hard to overstate the importance of receiving information directly from the source, such as when people inside the Senate chamber posted images of the rioters attempting to break through a barricaded door while security inside pointed their guns through broken windows.

Representatives, aides and reporters posted live as they were evacuated from their offices, told to lie on the ground to avoid being shot, or given gas masks in case tear gas or pepper spray was deployed. What might have seemed an abstraction when reported by a talking head on the National Mall was rendered shockingly visceral as these people expressed fear for their lives. The people to whom we have been trained to alert of such things, our elected officials, were the very ones being threatened.

However, social media also allowed for the amplification and normalization of these historic crimes as rioters streamed as they went and posted images to fringe sites like Parler and Trump-themed Reddit clones. It wasn’t hard to spot rioters apparently “doing it for the ‘gram” despite those images and videos comprising what amounts to a confession of a federal crime.

Meanwhile Trump and his allies downplayed the violence, blaming Democrats for using “malicious rhetoric” and repeating unfounded claims regarding the election.

Years of “we take this very seriously” by the likes of Jack Dorsey and Mark Zuckerberg have done little to curb the activity by the likes of white supremacists, self-styled “militias” like the Proud Boys, and misinformation aggregators like “Stop the steal” groups. Despite constant assurances that AI and a crack team of moderators are on the job, it is still on these platforms that we find misleading and false information about topics such as COVID-19 and election security.

Tech leaders today voiced, not for the first time, their frustration with these companies, and while deplatforming has proven effective in some ways, it is not a complete solution. As the cost and difficulty of launching, say, a streaming site, continues to decrease, it is only to be expected that when a YouTuber gets kicked off that platform, they will land softly on another and their audience will follow.

The promise and the danger of social media were both on display today at their absolute maximum. One can hardly imagine such an event playing out in the future without the intimate details to which we were treated from the sides of both government and insurrectionists.

While Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube have taken varying actions, of varying seriousness and permanence, it seems clear that whether or not they want to crack down on the worst of it, they may no longer be able to, either because they lack the tools, or the offenders have built a Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube of their own.

After pro-Trump extremists violently stormed the U.S. Capitol, a number of tech executives and industry leaders are calling on Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg to more aggressively curb the president’s messages amplifying and endorsing violence.

After Trump released a video calling the extremists “very special” and telling them to go home, Facebook and Twitter have taken down the content. Twitter has locked Donald Trump’s Twitter account for at least 12 hours, warning that “any future violations” of Twitter rules will result in permanent suspension of the account.

The riot triggered the platforms, after long scrutiny, to finally react to Trump’s incendiary tweets and messaging. As the situation continues to play out, some prominent tech figures see the root of the riots as the platforms that ignored and amplified misinformation surrounding the election, allowing violent rhetoric to spin out of control in the final days of the Trump presidency.

Chris Sacca, one of the earliest investors in Twitter, wrote “you’ve got blood on your hands, [Jack] and Zuck. For four years you’ve rationalized this terror. Inciting violent treason is not a free speech exercise. If you work at those companies, it’s on you too. Shut it down.”

Alexis Ohanian, the co-founder of Reddit, added to Sacca’s remark, saying: “there are a lot of hard questions we’re going to have to answer for our children.” Ohanian left Reddit’s board in 2020 following Black Lives Matter protests.

Alex Stamos, Facebook’s former Chief Security Officer wrote that both companies needed to act arguing that the “labeling won’t do it” and that Twitter and Facebook “have to cut him off.”

Tech platforms have repeatedly come under fire for failing to address the rise of misinformation and groups coalescing around conspiracy theories. Twitter’s latest response has been the introduction of tags to flag potential misinformation.

Ellen Pao, tech investor and the former CEO of Reddit, argues today’s chaos is directly linked to Dorsey’s inaction. In November, Pao and Laura Gómez, a former tech founder and CEO, called on Dorsey to limit Trump’s influence on Twitter, explicitly accusing Trump of using Twitter to incite “a coup.”

“[We] told them to do the right thing. They didn’t. And here we are,” Pao wrote on Twitter today.

Timnit Gebru, a top researcher who recently was fired from Google’s AI team, slammed Facebook and Twitter, but further placed blame on YouTube, which she says has “completely managed to get out of the spotlight” for facilitating hate speech.

A recent video from Trump, where he calls the rioters “special people” and urges them to go home, has recently been taken down from Twitter, Facebook and YouTube.

Guy Rosen, VP of Integrity at Facebook, tweeted that the events are an “emergency situation and we are taking appropriate emergency measures, including removing President Trump’s video. We removed it because on balance we believe it contributes to rather than diminishes the risk of ongoing violence.” Facebook released an official statement as well.

With Inauguration Day just two weeks out, platforms will continue to play an intense role in safeguarding a peaceful transfer of power. Today’s events feel like a tipping point. The terrorism has pushed Silicon Valley tech figures to critize some of the industry’s most powerful leaders and implore them to act before further violence takes place.

“Let me say in no uncertain terms @jack @vijaya @kayvz: If you do not suspend Donald Trump’s Twitter account for the next day at least, this mob attack on Congress is also on you. Sorry, but he has incited violence for days, using your tools in large part and you need to act now,” Tech media figure Kara Swisher wrote in a post on Twitter.

Color of Change, the nonprofit civil rights advocacy group, along with a growing number of other organizations called for social media companies such as Twitter and Facebook to remove President Donald Trump from the platforms, following a chaotic day of protests and rioting that led a mob of pro-Trump supporters to storm the U.S. Capitol and prompted a lockdown and an evacuation of lawmakers.

Color of Change and other activist organizations have said that major tech and financial service companies are complicit in the insurrection in Washington D.C. and called for social media to take action. Twitter  has locked the President of the United States’ Twitter account and forced the removal of three offending tweets, but the social media platform has not removed him from the platform altogether. The lock of the Twitter account will last for at least 12 hours.

Color of Change President Rashad Robinson tweeted Wednesday “Enough is enough. It’s time for Facebook and Twitter to kick Trump off their platforms. We’ve been in contact with @Facebook and @Twitter leadership about this but we need your help.”

The organization also has launched a petition that people can use to make a direct appeal to Twitter CEO Jack Dorsey. The petition reads:

Dear CEO Jack Dorsey,

Donald Trump has historically violated your terms of service with impunity and now, as a result of his promotion and facilitation of today’s chaos, insurrectionists have stormed our Senate building leaving Senators, staffers, and building employees fearing for their lives. Trump’s tweets have endangered the lives of millions of Americans, from his rants cheering on white supremacists to now advocating for the National Guard to use deadly force against Americans who are protesting against police killings. There is no excuse for allowing this dangerous user to exploit your platform It’s time to #KickTrumpOffTwitter.

Numerous other activist organizations, business groups and tech leaders have used social media to condemn the events Wednesday. Accountable Tech, an ethics organization, tweeted Wednesday that the violent assault has been heartbreaking, but not expected. “Sadly, Twitter and Facebook’s preparedness and response has been wildly inadequate. Simply labeling incitements of violence is not enough.”

Other organizations such as the U.S. Travel Association, the Jewish Council for Public Affairs and Business Round Table offered their own condemnations of the events, but didn’t directly criticize social media for its involvement.

Business Roundtable, whose members are chief executive officers of major United States corporations, focused efforts on Trump and called for an end to the chaos and a peaceful transition of power. Others such as the National Association of Manufacturers used stronger language, noting that the protesters supporting Trump was an act of “sedition” and “mob rule” and urged Vice President Mike Pence to “seriously consider” invoking the 25th amendment.