Author: azeeadmin

Berlin-based Mobius Labs has closed a €5.2 million (~$6.1M) funding round off the back of increased demand for its computer vision training platform. The Series A investment is led by Ventech VC, along with Atlantic Labs, APEX Ventures, Space Capital, Lunar Ventures plus some additional angel investors.

The startup offers an SDK that lets the user create custom computer vision models fed with a little of their own training data — as an alternative to off-the-shelf tools which may not have the required specificity for a particular use-case.

It also flags a ‘no code’ focus, saying its tech has been designed with a non-technical user in mind.

As it’s an SDK, Mobius Labs’ platform can also be deployed on premise and/or on device — rather than the customer needing to connect to a cloud service to tap into the AI tool’s utility.

“Our custom training user interface is very simple to work with, and requires no prior technical knowledge on any level,” claims Appu Shaji, CEO and chief scientist. 

“Over the years, a trend we have observed is that often the people who get the maximum value from AI are non technical personas like a content manager in a press and creative agency, or an application manager in the space sector. Our no-code AI allows anyone to build their own applications, thus enabling these users to get close to their vision without having to wait for AI experts or developer teams to help them.”

Mobius Labs — which was founded back in 2018 — now has 30 customers using its tools for a range of use cases.

Uses include categorisation, recommendation, prediction, reducing operational expense, and/or “generally connecting users and audiences to visual content that is most relevant to their needs”. (Press and broadcasting and the stock photography sector have unsurprisingly been big focuses to date.)

But it reckons there’s wider utility for its tech and is gearing up for growth.

It caters to businesses of various sizes, from startups to SMEs, but says it mainly targets global enterprises with major content challenges — hence its historical focus on the media sector and video use cases.

Now, though, it’s also targeting geospatial and earth observation applications as it seeks to expand its customer base.

The 30-strong startup has more than doubled in size over the last 18 months. With the new funding it’s planning to double its headcount again over the next 12 months as it looks to expand its geographical footprint — focusing on Europe and the US.

Year-on-year growth has also been 2x but it believes it can dial that up by tapping into other sectors.

“We are working with industries that are rich in visual data,” says Shaji. “The geospatial sector is something that we are focussing on currently as we have a strong belief that vast amounts of visual data is being produced by them. However, these huge archives of raw pixel data are useless on their own.

“For instance, if we want to track how river fronts are expanding, we have to look at data collected by satellites, sort and tag them in order to analyse them. Currently this is being done manually. The technology we are creating comes in a lightweight SDK, and can be deployed directly into these satellites so that the raw data can be detected and then analysed by machine learning algorithms. We are currently working with satellite companies in this sector.”

On the competitive front, Shaji names Clarifai and Google Cloud Vision as the main rivals it has in its sights.  

“We realise these are the big players but at the same time believe that we have something unique to offer, which these players cannot: Unlike their solutions, our platform users can be outside the field of computer vision. By democratising the training of machine learning models beyond simply the technical crowd, we are making computer vision accessible and understandable by anyone, regardless of their job titles,” he argues.

“Another core value that differentiates us is the way we treat client data. Our solutions are delivered in the form of a Software Development Kit (SDK), which runs on-premise, completely locally on clients’ systems. No data is ever sent back to us. Our role is to empower people to build applications, and make them their own.”

Computer vision startups have been a hot acquisition target in recent years and some earlier startups offering ‘computer vision as a service’ got acquired by IT services firms to beef up their existing offerings, while tech giants like Amazon and (the aforementioned) Google offer their own computer vision services too.

But Shaji suggests the tech is now at a different stage of development — and primed for “mass adoption”. 

“We’re talking about providing solutions that empower clients to build their own applications,” he says, summing up the competitive play. “And that [do that] with complete data privacy, where our solutions run on-premise, and we don’t see our clients data. Coupled with that is the ease of use that our technology offers: It is a lightweight solution that can be deployed on many ‘edge’ devices like smartphones, laptops, and even on satellites.”  

Commenting on the funding in a statement, Stephan Wirries, partner at Ventech VC, added: “Appu and the team at Mobius Labs have developed an unparalleled offering in the computer vision space. Superhuman Vision is impressively innovative with its high degree of accuracy despite very limited required training to recognise new objects at excellent computational efficiency. We believe industries will be transformed through AI, and Mobius Labs is the European Deep Tech innovator teaching machines to see.”

ProtonMail, a hosted email service with a focus on end-to-end encrypted communications, has been facing criticism after a police report showed that French authorities managed to obtain the IP address of a French activist who was using the online service. The company has communicated widely about the incident, stating that it doesn’t log IP addresses by default and it only complies with local regulation — in that case Swiss law. While ProtonMail didn’t cooperate with French authorities, French police sent a request to Swiss police via Europol to force the company to obtain the IP address of one of its users.

For the past year, a group of people have taken over a handful of commercial premises and apartments near Place Sainte Marthe in Paris. They want to fight against gentrification, real estate speculation, Airbnb and high-end restaurants. While it started as a local conflict, it quickly became a symbolic campaign. They attracted newspaper headlines when they started occupying premises rented by Le Petit Cambodge — a restaurant that was targeted by the November 13th, 2015 terrorist attacks in Paris.

On September 1st, the group published an article on Paris-luttes.info, an anticapitalist news website, summing up different police investigations and legal cases against some members of the group. According to their story, French police sent an Europol request to ProtonMail in order to uncover the identity of the person who created a ProtonMail account — the group was using this email address to communicate. The address has also been shared on various anarchist websites.

The next day, @MuArF on Twitter shared an abstract of a police report detailing ProtonMail’s reply. According to @MuArF, the police report is related to the ongoing investigation against the group who occupied various premises around Place Sainte-Marthe. It says that French police received a message on Europol. That message contains details about the ProtonMail account.

Here’s what the report says:

• The company PROTONMAIL informs us that the email address has been created on … The IP address linked to the account is the following: …
• The device used is a … device identified with the number …
• The data transmitted by the company is limited to that due to the privacy policy of PROTONMAIL TECHNOLOGIES.”

ProtonMail’s founder and CEO Andy Yen reacted to the police report on Twitter without mentioning the specific circumstances of that case in particular. “Proton must comply with Swiss law. As soon as a crime is committed, privacy protections can be suspended and we’re required by Swiss law to answer requests from Swiss authorities,” he wrote.

In particular, Andy Yen wants to make it clear that his company didn’t cooperate with French police nor Europol. It seems like Europol acted as the communication channel between French authorities and Swiss authorities. At some point, Swiss authorities took over the case and sent a request to ProtonMail directly. The company references these requests as “foreign requests approved by Swiss authorities” in its transparency report.

TechCrunch contacted ProtonMail founder and CEO Andy Yen with questions about the case.

One key question is exactly when the targeted account holder was notified that their data had been requested by Swiss authorities since — per ProtonMail — notification is obligatory under Swiss law.

However, Yen told us that — “for privacy and legal reasons” — he is unable to comment on specific details of the case or provide “non-public information on active investigations”, adding: “You would have to direct these inquiries to the Swiss authorities.”

At the same time, he did point us to this public page, where ProtonMail provides information for law enforcement authorities seeking data about users of its end-to-end encrypted email service, including setting out a “ProtonMail user notification policy”.

Here the company reiterates that Swiss law “requires a user to be notified if a third party makes a request for their private data and such data is to be used in a criminal proceeding” — however it also notes that “in certain circumstances” a notification “can be delayed”.

Per this policy, Proton says delays can affect notifications if: There is a temporary prohibition on notice by the Swiss legal process itself, by Swiss court order or “applicable Swiss law”; or where “based on information supplied by law enforcement, we, in our absolute discretion, believe that providing notice could create a risk of injury, death, or irreparable damage to an identifiable individual or group of individuals.”

“As a general rule though, targeted users will eventually be informed and afforded the opportunity to object to the data request, either by ProtonMail or by Swiss authorities,” the policy adds.

So, in the specific case, it looks likely that ProtonMail was either under legal order to delay notification to the account holder — given what appears to be up to eight months between the logging being instigated and disclosure of it — or it had been provided with information by the Swiss authorities which led it to conclude that delaying notice was essential to avoid a risk of “injury, death, or irreparable damage” to a person or persons (NB: it is unclear what “irreparable damage” means in this context, and whether it could be interpreted figuratively — as ‘damage’ to a person’s/group’s interests, for example, such as to a criminal investigation, not solely bodily harm — which would make the policy considerably more expansive).

In either scenario the level of transparency being afforded to individuals by Swiss law having a mandatory notification requirement when a person’s data has been requested looks severely limited if the same law authorities can, essentially, gag notifications — potentially for long periods (seemingly more than half a year in this specific case).

ProtonMail’s public disclosures also log an alarming rise in requests for data by Swiss authorities.

According to its transparency report, ProtonMail received 13 orders from Swiss authorities back in 2017 — but that had swelled to over three and a half thousand (3,572!) by 2020.

The number of foreign requests to Swiss authorities which are being approved has also risen, although not as steeply — with ProtonMail reporting receiving 13 such requests in 2017 — rising to 195 in 2020.

The company says it complies with lawful requests for user data but it also says it contests orders where it does not believe them to be lawful. And its reporting shows an increase in contested orders — with ProtonMail contesting three orders back in 2017 but in 2020 it pushed back against 750 of the data requests it received.

Per ProtonMail’s privacy policy, the information it can provide on a user account in response to a valid request under Swiss law may include account information provided by the user (such as an email address); account activity/metadata (such as sender, recipient email addresses; IP addresses incoming messages originated from; the times messages were sent and received; message subjects etc); total number of messages, storage used and last login time; and unencrypted messages sent from external providers to ProtonMail. As an end-to-end encrypted email provider, it cannot decrypt email data so is unable to provide information on the contents of email, even when served with a warrant.

However in its transparency report, the company also signals an additional layer of data collection which it may be (legally) obligated to carry out — writing that: “In addition to the items listed in our privacy policy, in extreme criminal cases, ProtonMail may also be obligated to monitor the IP addresses which are being used to access the ProtonMail accounts which are engaged in criminal activities.”

It’s that IP monitoring component which has caused such alarm among privacy advocates now — and no small criticism of Proton’s marketing claims as a ‘user privacy centric’ company.

It has faced particular criticism for marketing claims of providing “anonymous email” and for the wording of the caveat in its transparency disclosure — where it talks about IP logging only occurring in “extreme criminal cases”.

Few would agree that anti-gentrification campaigners meet that bar.

At the same time, Proton does provide users with an onion address — meaning activists concerned about tracking can access its encrypted email service using Tor which makes it harder for their IP address to be tracked. So it is providing tools for users to protect themselves against IP monitoring (as well as protect the contents of their emails from being snooped on), even though its own service can, in certain circumstances, be turned into an IP monitoring tool by Swiss law enforcement.

In the backlash around the revelation of the IP logging of the French activists, Yen said via Twitter that ProtonMail will be providing a more prominent link to its onion address on its website:

Proton does also offer a VPN service of its own — and Yen has claimed that Swiss law does not allow it to log its VPN users’ IP addresses. So it’s interesting to speculate whether the activists might have been able to evade the IP logging if they had been using both Proton’s end-to-end encrypted email and its VPN service…

“If they were using Tor or ProtonVPN, we would have been able to provide an IP, but it would be the IP of the VPN server, or the IP of the Tor exit node,” Yen told TechCrunch when we asked about this.

“We do protect against this threat model via our Onion site (protonmail.com/tor),” he added. “In general though, unless you are based 15 miles offshore in international waters, it is not possible to ignore court orders.”

“The Swiss legal system, while not perfect, does provide a number of checks and balances, and it's worth noting that even in this case, approval from three authorities in two countries was required, and that's a fairly high bar which prevents most (but not all) abuse of the system.”

In a public response on Reddit, Proton also writes that it is “deeply concerned” about the case — reiterating that it was unable to contest the order in this instance.

“The prosecution in this case seems quite aggressive,” it added. “Unfortunately, this is a pattern we have increasingly seen in recent years around the world (for example in France where terror laws are inappropriately used). We will continue to campaign against such laws and abuses.”

Zooming out, in another worrying development that could threaten the privacy of internet users in Europe, European Union lawmakers have signaled they want to work to find ways to enable lawful access to encrypted data — even as they simultaneously claim to support strong encryption.

Again, privacy campaigners are concerned.

ProtonMail and a number of other end-to-end encrypted services warned in an open letter in January that EU lawmakers risk setting the region on a dangerous path toward backdooring encryption if they continue in this direction.

Indian logistics firm Delhivery has courted one more high-profile investor before its expected IPO in the next two quarters: Lee Fixel’s Addition.

The Gurgaon-headquartered firm has disclosed in a regulatory filing that Addition has invested $76.4 million in the startup. The new investment is part of a Series I round, according to the filing, provided by market intelligence firm Tofler. So far Delhivery has disclosed only Addition’s investment. 

The 10-year-old startup began its life as a food delivery firm, but has since shifted to a full suite of logistics services in over 2,300 Indian cities and more than 17,500 zip codes. It is among a handful of startups attempting to digitize the demand and supply system of the logistics market through a freight exchange platform.

The new investment comes months after a subsidiary of FedEx invested $100 million in Delhivery, and the startup separately closed a $277 million financing round. The startup has said earlier this year that it was looking to file for an IPO within the next six to nine months.

Delhivery is one of the largest logistics firms in India. Its platform connects consigners, agents and truckers offering road transport solutions. The startup says the platform reduces the role of brokers, makes some of its assets such as trucking — the most popular transportation mode for Delhivery — more efficient, and ensures round the clock operations.

This digitization is crucial to address the inefficiencies in the Indian logistics industry that has long stunted the national economy. Poor planning and forecasting of demand and supply increases carrying costs, theft, damages and delays, analysts at Bernstein wrote in a report last month about India’s logistics market.

Delhivery, which says it has delivered over 1 billion orders, works with “all of India’s largest e-commerce companies and leading enterprises,” according to its website, where it also says the startup has worked with over 10,000 customers. For the last leg of the delivery, its couriers are assigned an area that never exceeds 2 square kilometers, allowing them to make several delivery runs a day to save time.

Indian logistics market’s TAM (total addressable market) is over $200 billion, Bernstein analysts said. The startup said late last year that it was planning to invest over $40 million within two years to expand and increase its fleet size to meet the growing demand of orders as more people shop online amid the pandemic.

UK tech accelerator Founders Factory is joining forces with a European counterpart to launch the Founders Factory Sustainability Seed program. Launched in partnership with G-Force (the G is for Green) based out of Bratislava, Slovakia, the program will look to invest in and accelerate climate-tech startups.

The program will invest in entrepreneurs with startups that can reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, speed up the transition to a circular economy, create sustainable housing and manufacturing solutions, as well as address climate-friendly mobility, food/feed production, and capturing/storing CO2 and methane.

The Program, run with G-Force largely out of Bratislava, Slovakia, will be operated in a “hybrid” manner: mixing remote and in-person support. The idea is that any eco-tech venture in any location in the world can apply and join the program.

Founders Factory’s partner in the Sustainability Seed program, G-Force, is being backed financially by a syndicate of Central and Eastern European investors including Boris Zelený (figure behind AVG, which sold to AVAST for $1.4bn), Marian Gazdik (Startup Grind), and early-stage investors Peter Külloi and Miklós Kóbor.

Startups selected program for the will get a Seed investment of up to €150,000, six months of startup support using Founders Factory’s team, as well as introductions to potential customers, partners, corporates, and investors.

Henry Lane Fox, Chief Executive Officer at Founders Factory, said: “By nurturing the disruption entrepreneurs are so good at creating we can design a better, more sustainable future for all. In partnership with G-Force, Founders Factory Sustainability Seed Program will be a leading pre/seed program committed to building and supporting the ventures that will have a positive impact on the world.”

Marian Gazdik, co-founding partner of G-Force, said: “Our ambition is to make G-Force, in partnership with the Founders Factory Sustainability Seed Program, into a world-class sustainability innovation hub, based in the heart of Europe.”

Expanding on the idea, Lane-Fox told me: “In this particular case, rather than being aligned to one individual corporate partner, which has been our model to date, we’re able to bring together a group of angel investors and make this more of a pure financial investor play. We think that actually suits this specific sector better. We will also be providing a bit more capital to those companies early on to make sure they can benefit from the program to the maximum degree.”

Gazdik added that by being based in the EU rather than the UK, the program will also be able to take advantage of some EU grant programs.

UK tech accelerator Founders Factory is joining forces with a European counterpart to launch the Founders Factory Sustainability Seed program. Launched in partnership with G-Force (the G is for Green) based out of Bratislava, Slovakia, the program will look to invest in and accelerate climate-tech startups.

The program will invest in entrepreneurs with startups that can reduce the world’s greenhouse gas emissions, speed up the transition to a circular economy, create sustainable housing and manufacturing solutions, as well as address climate-friendly mobility, food/feed production, and capturing/storing CO2 and methane.

The Program, run with G-Force largely out of Bratislava, Slovakia, will be operated in a “hybrid” manner: mixing remote and in-person support. The idea is that any eco-tech venture in any location in the world can apply and join the program.

Founders Factory’s partner in the Sustainability Seed program, G-Force, is being backed financially by a syndicate of Central and Eastern European investors including Boris Zelený (figure behind AVG, which sold to AVAST for $1.4bn), Marian Gazdik (Startup Grind), and early-stage investors Peter Külloi and Miklós Kóbor.

Startups selected program for the will get a Seed investment of up to €150,000, six months of startup support using Founders Factory’s team, as well as introductions to potential customers, partners, corporates, and investors.

Henry Lane Fox, Chief Executive Officer at Founders Factory, said: “By nurturing the disruption entrepreneurs are so good at creating we can design a better, more sustainable future for all. In partnership with G-Force, Founders Factory Sustainability Seed Program will be a leading pre/seed program committed to building and supporting the ventures that will have a positive impact on the world.”

Marian Gazdik, co-founding partner of G-Force, said: “Our ambition is to make G-Force, in partnership with the Founders Factory Sustainability Seed Program, into a world-class sustainability innovation hub, based in the heart of Europe.”

Expanding on the idea, Lane-Fox told me: “In this particular case, rather than being aligned to one individual corporate partner, which has been our model to date, we’re able to bring together a group of angel investors and make this more of a pure financial investor play. We think that actually suits this specific sector better. We will also be providing a bit more capital to those companies early on to make sure they can benefit from the program to the maximum degree.”

Gazdik added that by being based in the EU rather than the UK, the program will also be able to take advantage of some EU grant programs.

Nigerian automotive tech company Autochek today is announcing the acquisition of Cheki Kenya and Uganda from Ringier One Africa Media (ROAM) for an undisclosed amount.

Per a statement, Autochek will finalize the deal in the coming weeks. With the acquisition, Autochek completes its expansion into East Africa and follows the first acquisition made almost a year ago when it acquired both Nigeria and Ghana businesses from Cheki.

In 2010, Cheki launched as an online car classified for dealers, importers, and private sellers in Nigeria. The startup, headquartered in Lagos, expanded operations to Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Cheki got acquired by ROAM in 2017 and joined a list of online marketplaces and classifieds in its network like Jobberman.

Per ROAM’s website, Cheki still has operations in Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. However, these markets are quite inactive so it is safe to say Autochek has fully acquired all of Cheki’s main operations.

Cheki Kenya is an exciting market for both parties. The subsidiary has 700,000 users and lists over 12,000 vehicles monthly. It also claims to have grown 80% year-on-year in the last two years, making it a valuable asset for Autochek’s plan for regional expansion.  

“Cheki Kenya has always been sort of the crown jewel,” Autochek CEO Etop Ikpe said to TechCrunch. “At the time, when we completed the Nigeria and Ghana acquisition, it wasn’t a conscious effort to make this happen, but it’s great that it happened.”

Credit penetration in terms of vehicle financing is higher in Kenya than in Nigeria and Ghana. The East African country has a 27.5% penetration compared to the whole West African market at 5%. Therefore, it explains why Autochek is optimistic about the East African market. Before making the acquisition, the one-year-old company ran a stealthy pilot with some banks in Kenya — a similar strategy used in Ghana and Nigeria — to provide car owners with financing. So, the acquisition cements the company’s position in the market, Ikpe says. 

The sale of Cheki operations in all of its major markets, which happened within a year, might lead some to ask if the four entities did poorly and forced the classifieds giant to find a suitable buyer quickly.

But CEO Ikpe refuted any claims of a distress sale when asked. He stated that the acquisition happened in quick succession because both parties understood that the classifieds model (run by Cheki) needed to make way for the more modern transactional model (employed by Autochek and leading automotive players in Africa). Therefore, ROAM Africa saw it as a needed transition for Cheki.

Building off Ikpe’s past relationship with Ringier (one arm of ROAM before the merger), where he ran DealDey, a classifieds deal company Ringier eventually bought, it wasn’t a tough decision to sell the company to Autochek, Ikpe tells TechCrunch.

“I think for them it’s really long term strategy and they believe in our business model. And there’s a lot of hope that we can do things in the future. It was also really about finding the right home for the business and their employees.”

From a statement, ROAM CEO Clemens Weitz said, “Across the world, we see a new evolution of digital automotive platforms, requiring deep specialization. Specifically in Africa, we believe that Autochek is the one player with the best team and expertise to truly create a game-changing consumer experience. For ROAM Africa, this deal is more than a very good transaction: It unleashes even more focus on our strategic playbook for our other businesses.”  

Autochek’s expansion to East Africa is coming at a time when automotive tech companies like Moove, Planet42, and FlexClub are receiving attention from investors as the need for flexible vehicle financing keeps growing across the continent.

The most important car financing market on the continent is arguably South Africa. Other automotive companies have some form of presence in the market and for Autochek, the plan is to expand there too, and understandably why.

South Africa is the crème de la crème market and has the highest car financing penetration on the continent. Yet despite the seeming competition, Ikpe believes opportunities exist for the company to provide services tailored to the market different from what other companies have.

“The beauty of our platform is that we can be diverse; for instance, we can have a retail or B2B approach. There’s a lot of dynamic ways we can work. So I think it’s natural that our goal is to typically be in every region. We’ve made our inroads into East and West, and we’ll continue to work as we want to be in North and South Africa,” he said.

Autochek says a funding round is in the works to execute on this front and might close before the end of the year.

Nigerian automotive tech company Autochek today is announcing the acquisition of Cheki Kenya and Uganda from Ringier One Africa Media (ROAM) for an undisclosed amount.

Per a statement, Autochek will finalize the deal in the coming weeks. With the acquisition, Autochek completes its expansion into East Africa and follows the first acquisition made almost a year ago when it acquired both Nigeria and Ghana businesses from Cheki.

In 2010, Cheki launched as an online car classified for dealers, importers, and private sellers in Nigeria. The startup, headquartered in Lagos, expanded operations to Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, Uganda, Zambia, and Zimbabwe.

Cheki got acquired by ROAM in 2017 and joined a list of online marketplaces and classifieds in its network like Jobberman.

Per ROAM’s website, Cheki still has operations in Tanzania, Zambia, and Zimbabwe. However, these markets are quite inactive so it is safe to say Autochek has fully acquired all of Cheki’s main operations.

Cheki Kenya is an exciting market for both parties. The subsidiary has 700,000 users and lists over 12,000 vehicles monthly. It also claims to have grown 80% year-on-year in the last two years, making it a valuable asset for Autochek’s plan for regional expansion.  

“Cheki Kenya has always been sort of the crown jewel,” Autochek CEO Etop Ikpe said to TechCrunch. “At the time, when we completed the Nigeria and Ghana acquisition, it wasn’t a conscious effort to make this happen, but it’s great that it happened.”

Credit penetration in terms of vehicle financing is higher in Kenya than in Nigeria and Ghana. The East African country has a 27.5% penetration compared to the whole West African market at 5%. Therefore, it explains why Autochek is optimistic about the East African market. Before making the acquisition, the one-year-old company ran a stealthy pilot with some banks in Kenya — a similar strategy used in Ghana and Nigeria — to provide car owners with financing. So, the acquisition cements the company’s position in the market, Ikpe says. 

The sale of Cheki operations in all of its major markets, which happened within a year, might lead some to ask if the four entities did poorly and forced the classifieds giant to find a suitable buyer quickly.

But CEO Ikpe refuted any claims of a distress sale when asked. He stated that the acquisition happened in quick succession because both parties understood that the classifieds model (run by Cheki) needed to make way for the more modern transactional model (employed by Autochek and leading automotive players in Africa). Therefore, ROAM Africa saw it as a needed transition for Cheki.

Building off Ikpe’s past relationship with Ringier (one arm of ROAM before the merger), where he ran DealDey, a classifieds deal company Ringier eventually bought, it wasn’t a tough decision to sell the company to Autochek, Ikpe tells TechCrunch.

“I think for them it’s really long term strategy and they believe in our business model. And there’s a lot of hope that we can do things in the future. It was also really about finding the right home for the business and their employees.”

From a statement, ROAM CEO Clemens Weitz said, “Across the world, we see a new evolution of digital automotive platforms, requiring deep specialization. Specifically in Africa, we believe that Autochek is the one player with the best team and expertise to truly create a game-changing consumer experience. For ROAM Africa, this deal is more than a very good transaction: It unleashes even more focus on our strategic playbook for our other businesses.”  

Autochek’s expansion to East Africa is coming at a time when automotive tech companies like Moove, Planet42, and FlexClub are receiving attention from investors as the need for flexible vehicle financing keeps growing across the continent.

The most important car financing market on the continent is arguably South Africa. Other automotive companies have some form of presence in the market and for Autochek, the plan is to expand there too, and understandably why.

South Africa is the crème de la crème market and has the highest car financing penetration on the continent. Yet despite the seeming competition, Ikpe believes opportunities exist for the company to provide services tailored to the market different from what other companies have.

“The beauty of our platform is that we can be diverse; for instance, we can have a retail or B2B approach. There’s a lot of dynamic ways we can work. So I think it’s natural that our goal is to typically be in every region. We’ve made our inroads into East and West, and we’ll continue to work as we want to be in North and South Africa,” he said.

Autochek says a funding round is in the works to execute on this front and might close before the end of the year.

Factorial, a startup out of Barcelona that has built a platform that lets SMBs run human resources functions with the same kind of tools that typically are used by much bigger companies, is today announcing some funding to bulk up its own position: the company has raised $80 million, funding that it will be using to expand its operations geographically — specifically deeper into Latin American markets — and to continue to augment its product with more features.

CEO Jordi Romero, who co-founded the startup with Pau Ramon and Bernat Farrero — said in an interview that Factorial has seen a huge boom of growth in the last 18 months and counts more than anything 75,000 customers across 65 countries, with the average size of each customer in the range of 100 employees, although they can be significantly (single-digit) smaller or potentially up to 1,000 (the “M” of SMB, or SME as it’s often called in Europe).

“We have a generous definition of SME,” Romero said of how the company first started with a target of 10-15 employees but is now working in the size bracket that it is. “But that is the limit. This is the segment that needs the most help. We see other competitors of ours are trying to move into SME and they are screwing up their product by making it too complex. SMEs want solutions that have as much data as possible in one single place. That is unique to the SME.” Customers can include smaller franchises of much larger organizations, too: KFC, Booking.com, and Whisbi are among those that fall into this category for Factorial.

Factorial offers a one-stop shop to manage hiring, onboarding, payroll management, time off, performance management, internal communications and more. Other services such as the actual process of payroll or sourcing candidates, it partners and integrates closely with more localized third parties.

The Series B is being led by Tiger Global, and past investors CRV, Creandum, Point Nine and K Fund also participating, at a valuation we understand from sources close to the deal to be around $530 million post-money. Factorial has raised $100 million to date, including a $16 million Series A round in early 2020, just ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic really taking hold of the world.

That timing turned out to be significant: Factorial, as you might expect of an HR startup, was shaped by Covid-19 in a pretty powerful way.

The pandemic, as we have seen, massively changed how — and where — many of us work. In the world of desk jobs, offices largely disappeared overnight, with people shifting to working at home in compliance with shelter-in-place orders to curb the spread of the virus, and then in many cases staying there even after those were lifted as companies grappled both with balancing the best (and least infectious) way forward and their own employees’ demands for safety and productivity. Front-line workers, meanwhile, faced a completely new set of challenges in doing their jobs, whether it was to minimize exposure to the coronavirus, or dealing with giant volumes of demand for their services. Across both, organizations were facing economics-based contractions, furloughs, and in other cases, hiring pushes, despite being office-less to carry all that out.

All of this had an impact on HR. People who needed to manage others, and those working for organizations, suddenly needed — and were willing to pay for — new kinds of tools to carry out their roles.

But it wasn’t always like this. In the early days, Romero said the company had to quickly adjust to what the market was doing.

“We target HR leaders and they are currently very distracted with furloughs and layoffs right now, so we turned around and focused on how we could provide the best value to them,” Romero said to me during the Series A back in early 2020. Then, Factorial made its product free to use and found new interest from businesses that had never used cloud-based services before but needed to get something quickly up and running to use while working from home (and that cloud migration turned out to be a much bigger trend played out across a number of sectors). Those turning to Factorial had previously kept all their records in local files or at best a “Dropbox folder, but nothing else,” Romero said.

It also provided tools specifically to address the most pressing needs HR people had at the time, such as guidance on how to implement furloughs and layoffs, best practices for communication policies and more. “We had to get creative,” Romero said.

But it wasn’t all simple. “We did suffer at the beginning,” Romero now says. “People were doing furloughs and [frankly] less attention was being paid to software purchasing. People were just surviving. Then gradually, people realized they needed to improve their systems in the cloud, to manage remote people better, and so on.” So after a couple of very slow months, things started to take off, he said.

Factorial’s rise is part of a much, longer-term bigger trend in which the enterprise technology world has at long last started to turn its attention to how to take the tools that originally were built for larger organizations, and right size them for smaller customers.

The metrics are completely different: large enterprises are harder to win as customers, but represent a giant payoff when they do sign up; smaller enterprises represent genuine scale since there are so many of them globally — 400 million, accounting for 95% of all firms worldwide. But so are the product demands, as Romero pointed out previously: SMBs also want powerful tools, but they need to work in a more efficient, and out-of-the-box way.

Factorial is not the only HR startup that has been honing in on this, of course. Among the wider field are PeopleHR, Workday, Infor, ADP, Zenefits, Gusto, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Rippling; and a very close competitor out of Europe, Germany’s Personio, raised $125 million on a $1.7 billion valuation earlier this year, speaking not just to the opportunity but the success it is seeing in it.

But the major fragmentation in the market, the fact that there are so many potential customers, and Factorial’s own rapid traction are three reasons why investors approached the startup, which was not proactively seeking funding when it decided to go ahead with this Series B.

“The HR software market opportunity is very large in Europe, and Factorial is incredibly well positioned to capitalize on it,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global, in a statement. “Our diligence found a product that delighted customers and a world-class team well-positioned to achieve Factorial’s potential.”

“It is now clear that labor markets around the world have shifted over the past 18 months,” added Reid Christian, general partner at CRV, which led its previous round, which had been CRV’s first investment in Spain. “This has strained employers who need to manage their HR processes and properly serve their employees. Factorial was always architected to support employers across geographies with their HR and payroll needs, and this has only accelerated the demand for their platform. We are excited to continue to support the company through this funding round and the next phase of growth for the business.”

Notably, Romero told me that the fundraising process really evolved between the two rounds, with the first needing him flying around the world to meet people, and the second happening over video links, while he was recovering himself from Covid-19. Given that it was not too long ago that the most ambitious startups in Europe were encouraged to relocate to the U.S. if they wanted to succeed, it seems that it’s not just the world of HR that is rapidly shifting in line with new global conditions.

Factorial, a startup out of Barcelona that has built a platform that lets SMBs run human resources functions with the same kind of tools that typically are used by much bigger companies, is today announcing some funding to bulk up its own position: the company has raised $80 million, funding that it will be using to expand its operations geographically — specifically deeper into Latin American markets — and to continue to augment its product with more features.

CEO Jordi Romero, who co-founded the startup with Pau Ramon and Bernat Farrero — said in an interview that Factorial has seen a huge boom of growth in the last 18 months and counts more than anything 75,000 customers across 65 countries, with the average size of each customer in the range of 100 employees, although they can be significantly (single-digit) smaller or potentially up to 1,000 (the “M” of SMB, or SME as it’s often called in Europe).

“We have a generous definition of SME,” Romero said of how the company first started with a target of 10-15 employees but is now working in the size bracket that it is. “But that is the limit. This is the segment that needs the most help. We see other competitors of ours are trying to move into SME and they are screwing up their product by making it too complex. SMEs want solutions that have as much data as possible in one single place. That is unique to the SME.” Customers can include smaller franchises of much larger organizations, too: KFC, Booking.com, and Whisbi are among those that fall into this category for Factorial.

Factorial offers a one-stop shop to manage hiring, onboarding, payroll management, time off, performance management, internal communications and more. Other services such as the actual process of payroll or sourcing candidates, it partners and integrates closely with more localized third parties.

The Series B is being led by Tiger Global, and past investors CRV, Creandum, Point Nine and K Fund also participating, at a valuation we understand from sources close to the deal to be around $530 million post-money. Factorial has raised $100 million to date, including a $16 million Series A round in early 2020, just ahead of the Covid-19 pandemic really taking hold of the world.

That timing turned out to be significant: Factorial, as you might expect of an HR startup, was shaped by Covid-19 in a pretty powerful way.

The pandemic, as we have seen, massively changed how — and where — many of us work. In the world of desk jobs, offices largely disappeared overnight, with people shifting to working at home in compliance with shelter-in-place orders to curb the spread of the virus, and then in many cases staying there even after those were lifted as companies grappled both with balancing the best (and least infectious) way forward and their own employees’ demands for safety and productivity. Front-line workers, meanwhile, faced a completely new set of challenges in doing their jobs, whether it was to minimize exposure to the coronavirus, or dealing with giant volumes of demand for their services. Across both, organizations were facing economics-based contractions, furloughs, and in other cases, hiring pushes, despite being office-less to carry all that out.

All of this had an impact on HR. People who needed to manage others, and those working for organizations, suddenly needed — and were willing to pay for — new kinds of tools to carry out their roles.

But it wasn’t always like this. In the early days, Romero said the company had to quickly adjust to what the market was doing.

“We target HR leaders and they are currently very distracted with furloughs and layoffs right now, so we turned around and focused on how we could provide the best value to them,” Romero said to me during the Series A back in early 2020. Then, Factorial made its product free to use and found new interest from businesses that had never used cloud-based services before but needed to get something quickly up and running to use while working from home (and that cloud migration turned out to be a much bigger trend played out across a number of sectors). Those turning to Factorial had previously kept all their records in local files or at best a “Dropbox folder, but nothing else,” Romero said.

It also provided tools specifically to address the most pressing needs HR people had at the time, such as guidance on how to implement furloughs and layoffs, best practices for communication policies and more. “We had to get creative,” Romero said.

But it wasn’t all simple. “We did suffer at the beginning,” Romero now says. “People were doing furloughs and [frankly] less attention was being paid to software purchasing. People were just surviving. Then gradually, people realized they needed to improve their systems in the cloud, to manage remote people better, and so on.” So after a couple of very slow months, things started to take off, he said.

Factorial’s rise is part of a much, longer-term bigger trend in which the enterprise technology world has at long last started to turn its attention to how to take the tools that originally were built for larger organizations, and right size them for smaller customers.

The metrics are completely different: large enterprises are harder to win as customers, but represent a giant payoff when they do sign up; smaller enterprises represent genuine scale since there are so many of them globally — 400 million, accounting for 95% of all firms worldwide. But so are the product demands, as Romero pointed out previously: SMBs also want powerful tools, but they need to work in a more efficient, and out-of-the-box way.

Factorial is not the only HR startup that has been honing in on this, of course. Among the wider field are PeopleHR, Workday, Infor, ADP, Zenefits, Gusto, IBM, Oracle, SAP and Rippling; and a very close competitor out of Europe, Germany’s Personio, raised $125 million on a $1.7 billion valuation earlier this year, speaking not just to the opportunity but the success it is seeing in it.

But the major fragmentation in the market, the fact that there are so many potential customers, and Factorial’s own rapid traction are three reasons why investors approached the startup, which was not proactively seeking funding when it decided to go ahead with this Series B.

“The HR software market opportunity is very large in Europe, and Factorial is incredibly well positioned to capitalize on it,” said John Curtius, Partner at Tiger Global, in a statement. “Our diligence found a product that delighted customers and a world-class team well-positioned to achieve Factorial’s potential.”

“It is now clear that labor markets around the world have shifted over the past 18 months,” added Reid Christian, general partner at CRV, which led its previous round, which had been CRV’s first investment in Spain. “This has strained employers who need to manage their HR processes and properly serve their employees. Factorial was always architected to support employers across geographies with their HR and payroll needs, and this has only accelerated the demand for their platform. We are excited to continue to support the company through this funding round and the next phase of growth for the business.”

Notably, Romero told me that the fundraising process really evolved between the two rounds, with the first needing him flying around the world to meet people, and the second happening over video links, while he was recovering himself from Covid-19. Given that it was not too long ago that the most ambitious startups in Europe were encouraged to relocate to the U.S. if they wanted to succeed, it seems that it’s not just the world of HR that is rapidly shifting in line with new global conditions.

Dukaan, a one-year-old Bangalore-based startup that enables merchants to set up online stores and sell products digitally, said on Monday it has raised $11 million in a new financing round as it looks to broaden its offerings and deepen footprints in the South Asian market.

The new financing round, a Pre-Series A, was led by New York-headquartered 640 Oxford Ventures. Venture Catalyst, HOF Capital, Old Well Ventures, LetsVenture, 9Unicorns, and existing investors including Lightspeed Partners and Leopard Ventures also participated in the new round.

Ritesh Agarwal of Oyo and Carl Pei of Noting also invested in the new round, said the startup, which has raised over $17 million to date.

Dukaan provides individuals with no-code tools to set up digital presence. Once they have set up the store, they can manually add the inventory they have and start selling to their customers.

The process is straightforward and quick. “First you verify your email address or phone number and then you write your business or store name. And that’s it. Your digital store has been created,” said Suumit Shah, co-founder and chief executive of Dukaan, in an interview with TechCrunch.

For merchants operating in the grocery space, Dukaan also allows them to take pictures of their inventory and automatically logs them in the digital store. The startup also helps merchants accept digital payments.

Dukaan is largely tapping into India’s massive neighborhood market. More than 100 million Indians work in what is locally more popular as kiranas. These stores, in many cases, have been operational for decades.

In recent years, scores of firms including Reliance, Amazon and Flipkart have attempted to disrupt their business — to little to no success. In fact, most of these firms are now increasingly exploring ways to engage with these merchants.

But the way Dukaan has been developed, it can also be used by restaurants trying to get online, or teachers who are looking to set up their digital presence.

“All these digital stores, by default, get a mydukaan.io website, which they distribute among their customers and friends. This has helped our startup gain more recognition in the market,” said Shah.

The startup’s eponymous offering charges individuals or businesses as little as 699 Indian rupees, or $9.5, per year for its services. It also offers some premium plans such as Dukaan Infinity — as part of which it helps businesses conduct marketing on Facebook and Google and helps them rank better on Google search — and Dukaan Enterprise for big businesses.

Retail chain Big Bazaar and German personal care brand Nivea are customers of Dukaan Enterprise. “In case of Nivea, they have scores of distributors across the country. Now they are getting their distributors to sell the vast majority of their inventories to stores through Dukaan to bring more efficiency to the system,” he said.

“There is a massive white space opportunity to service the commerce needs of India’s 100 million+ small businesses and the Dukaan team with its strong product orientation and deep knowledge of the small business user is ideally positioned to lead the creation of new categories of commerce businesses in India,” said Akshay Bhushan, Partner at Lightspeed, in a statement.

This is a developing story. More to follow…