Author: azeeadmin

Reliance Jio continues to add billions of dollars to its bank account, Apple scores a tax victory in Europe and researchers test a system for undersea Wi-Fi (with lasers!). Here’s your Daily Crunch for July 15, 2020.

Google invests $4.5 billion in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms

Another giant tech company has invested in India’s largest telecom, following Facebook’s investment a couple of months ago. Reliance Jio has raised about $20.2 billion in the past four months — more than the entire Indian startup ecosystem raised last year. Google and Reliance Jio will also be working together to develop low-cost Android smartphones.

“Getting technology into the hands of more people is a big part of Google’s mission,” said Google CEO Sundar Pichai. “Together we are excited to rethink, from the ground up, how millions of users in India can become owners of smartphones.”

The tech giants

Apple and Ireland win appeal against the European Commission’s $15 billion tax ruling — Four years ago, the European Commission said that Ireland had failed to collect around $15 billion in taxes from Apple, but the European Court of Justice has annulled that decision.

Zoom introduces all-in-one home communications appliance for $599 — The new Zoom for Home – DTEN ME includes a large tablet with three wide-angle cameras and eight microphones.

Snap debuts a 13-week remote program to help developers create deeper Snap Kit integrations — Yellow Collabs is an expansion of Snap’s Yellow division, which previously consisted only of a startup accelerator.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Fraud detection startup Ravelin secures $20M Series C — The startup’s goal is to use machine learning to improve the fraud detection process, giving merchants more confidence in accepting customers and transactions.

Lemonade launches pet insurance — This is Lemonade’s first new vertical since it launched renters and homeowners insurance in 2016.

Substack launches Defender, a program offering legal support to independent writers — The newsletter platform said it will determine who to support on a case-by-case basis, covering up to $1 million in legal fees (or even more in “exceptional cases”).

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

How to do remote work right, from the teams that know it best — Tips from Zapier CEO Wade Foster, FlexJobs CEO Sara Sutton, Twilio CEO Jeff Lawson and others.

Emergence’s Jason Green thinks some of the tech backlash is justified, but the B2B opportunities still outweigh the challenges — The VC also described the death of George Floyd as “a profound moment and shift for me personally.”

Generative algorithms are redefining the intersection of software and music — Generative algorithms and growing amounts of computing power are increasingly changing what computers can do with music today.

(Reminder: Extra Crunch is our subscription membership program, which aims to democratize information about startups. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Researchers develop laser-based underwater Wi-Fi system for sub-sea data networks — The researchers from King Abdullah University of Science and Technology managed to use their system to do Skype calls and move files back and forth, but they also burned out the Raspberry Pi using lasers that overwhelmed its capabilities.

Nissan stakes its EV future on the 300-mile-range Ariya crossover — The Ariya is an all-electric SUV with a starting price of $40,000.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.

Optimizely, a San Francisco-based startup that popularized the concept of A/B testing, has laid off 15% of its staff, the company confirmed in a statement to TechCrunch. The layoff impacts around 60 people, and those laid off were given varied levels of severance. Each employee was given 6 months of COBRA and was allowed to keep their laptops.

“As with so many other businesses globally, Optimizely has been impacted by COVID-19. Today, we have had to make a heartbreaking decision to reduce the size of our workforce,” Erin Flynn, chief people office, wrote in a statement to TechCrunch, adding that “today’s difficult decision sets up our business for continued success.”

The startup was founded in 2009 by Dan Siroker and Pete Koomen, on the idea that it helps to have customers experience different versions of the website, also known as A/B testing, to see what iteration sticks best. A year after founding, the startup went through Y Combinator in 2010 and in 2013 it signed a lease for a 56,000-square-foot office in San Francisco.

Optimizely last raised $50 million in Series D financing from Goldman Sachs, bringing its total venture capital secured to date at $200 million. Other investors include Index Ventures, Anddreessen Horowitz and GV.

In June, Optimizely said it handles more than 6 billion events a day. Customers include Visa, BBC, IBM, Wall Street Journal, Gap, StubHub, and Metromile.

Optimizely was not listed as applying for a PPP loan, a program created by the government to help businesses avoid laying off staff. The loans were met with controversy in Silicon Valley, as some thought venture-backed businesses should turn to investors, instead of the government, for extra capital.

Optimizely’s layoffs are somewhat surprising given recent earnings reports that show that enterprise SaaS companies have broadly benefited from the coronavirus pandemic. In an online work world, infrastructure and software services become more vital by the day. Box, for example, helps people manage content in the cloud and it beat expectations on adjusted profit and revenue. So why is Optimizely struggling?

There are a ton of reasons for layoffs beyond what the market thinks about a business. Optimzely’s customers are a mix of heavy-hitters in enterprise, but also include businesses that have struggled during this pandemic, including StubHub and Metromile — both of which had layoffs.

While the pace of layoffs is slowing down, cuts themselves aren’t disappearing. As the stocks show us, it’s a volatile time and businesses are looking for ways to stay financially safe.

Twitter’s stock slid as much as 4% in after-hours trading as the company tried to swat down hackers that had taken over the accounts of multiple high-profile users.

Accounts belonging to Barack Obama, Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Kanye West, Joe Biden, Warren Buffet, Apple and many others had their accounts compromised Wednesday afternoon, all posting tweets directing users to a Bitcoin scam. The scam directs the account’s followers to send a certain number of Bitcoin to a blockchain address.

A Twitter spokesperson told TechCrunch the company was “looking into” the matter but didn’t immediately comment.

By the time of publication, the blockchain address associated with the hacked tweets had amassed more than $100,000 worth of Bitcoin.

In a set of new lawsuits, two Illinois residents argue that three tech giants violated state laws prohibiting the use of personal biometric data without permission. Illinois residents Steven Vance and Tim Janecyk allege that images of their faces appeared in IBM’s “Diversity in Faces” database without their consent and were used to train facial recognition systems at Amazon, Microsoft and Google’s parent company Alphabet.

While all three companies are based on the West Coast, the suit accuses the tech giants of running afoul of an Illinois law known as the Biometric Information Privacy Act (BIPA). The suit names Vance and Janecyk as plaintiffs but also seeks class action status on behalf of “all other similarly situated individuals” in Illinois. In the lawsuit, the pair of plaintiffs seek $5,000 per violation of the law, an injunction barring the companies from using Illinois residents’ “biometric identifiers” and the destruction of any relevant facial data that’s been stored.

“In its effort to improve its facial recognition technology, Defendant Microsoft violated Illinois’ Biometric Information Privacy Act… by, among other things, unlawfully collecting, obtaining, storing, using, possessing and profiting from the biometric identifiers and information of Plaintiffs Vance and Janecyk and all other similarly situated Illinois residents and citizens (hereinafter, the “Class Members”),” the version of the suit against Microsoft states.

The law cited in the suit, passed more than a decade ago, is designed to protect Illinois residents from having their biometric data harvested or stored without their explicit permission. Lawsuits involving BIPA pop up with some frequency now, as facial recognition becomes both more commonplace and more controversial. In the absence of federal privacy protections in the U.S., the Illinois law poses an interesting hurdle for companies that are used to extracting data from Americans with little oversight.

In January of this year, Facebook paid $550 million to settle a class action lawsuit stemming from BIPA. The suit was filed on behalf of Illinois residents in 2015 and alleged that the social media giant collected facial recognition data from user images without disclosing it to users. At the time, Snapchat, Google, and Shutterfly faced similar suits.

In 2019, a U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals court swatted away Facebook’s claim that facial recognition data did not count as biometric data, stating that “development of face template using facial-recognition technology without consent (as alleged here) invades an individual’s private affairs and concrete interests.”

The IBM dataset the companies trained facial recognition systems on also poses its own controversies. As NBC News reported last year, IBM claimed that its Diversity in Faces dataset was designed “purely for academic research” and not for the company’s own commercial interests. The IBM dataset was apparently culled from more than 100 million Creative Commons-licensed Flickr images, a decision that raised its own ethical questions around the use of facial imagery and if corporations should be allowed leverage images with open licensing for facial recognition applications without the consent of photographers and the people they photograph.

StackHawk, the Denver-based software startup offering service to detect and fix security bugs, is doubling down on its support for the popular open source Owasp Zed Attack Proxy web app security scanner by bringing on board its founder, Simon Bennetts.

At StackHawk, Bennets will continue to focus on the development of the open source project, which the company said is among the world’s most frequently used security scanning tools.

StackHawk already uses the open source project for its underlying scanning technology and has built a business by layering on security test automation, integrations with development tools and functionality for new development paradigms. 

“Since founding ZAP, the vision has always been to deliver application security to developers,” Bennetts said, in a statement. “While the project has been widely adopted by security teams and pen testers, I’m excited to work with a team dedicated to delivering our original vision of AppSec for devs and that also believes in growing the open source community.” 

StackHawk founders Joni Klippert, Scott Gerlach and Ryan Servers and Bennetts found common cause in their belief that bug editing tools are too often built for external enterprise security teams instead of the developers who are closest to the apps they’re building.

“Simon’s work on the ZAP project has both changed the security and open-source worlds for the better. It became clear that we were highly aligned in our mission to bring application security into the hands of developers,” said Klippert, the chief executive and founder of StackHawk, in a statement. “Simon joining the StackHawk team provides an exciting opportunity to invest more in the ZAP open source project, while also building capabilities that make it easy for enterprise development teams to streamline AppSec into their CI/CD pipelines.” 

In the eleven years since Bennetts first began working on ZAP, the OWASP Foundation-incorporated security scanner has become popular among the developer community for its dynamic application security testing.

After the hire, StackHawk said that nothing much will change. Bennetts will continue to work on the open source project while the company will continue to build functionality around the scanner.

The Denver-based company has raised nearly $5 million in financing from investors including Flybridge, Costanoa Ventures, Matchstick Ventures and Foundry Group .

On the heels of nCino’s blockbuster debut, GoHealth’s public offering proved a more sedate affair, at least when comparing the two companies’ initial trading days.

GoHealth priced above its anticipated IPO range, selling more shares than initially planned in the process. By vending 43.5 million shares at $21 apiece — $1 per share more than the top of its preceding $18 to $20 range, and four million shares more than its target of 39.5 million — the insurance technology company put more than $900 million onto its balance sheet this week.

The debut is a win for Chicago’s industry and tech scenes. GoHealth was worth a little less than $6.7 billion at its IPO price, not counting shares that may be sold to its underwriters, which would boost its valuation.

Despite its better-than-anticipated pricing, however, GoHealth shares sagged in afternoon trading, slipping to $19.00 per share, down 9.5% as of the time of writing. The declines stand in contrast to the recent debuts of nCino, Lemonade and others, which saw their shares instantly gain value after going public.

GoHealth’s CEO, however, stressed the long-term vision of his company in an interview with TechCrunch. Speaking with Clint Jones during GoHealth’s first trading day, the executive told TechCrunch that his company’s offering was oversubscribed, and had met its goal of accumulating long-term investors during its IPO process.

The company intends to hire with its new funds, including 1,000 more licensed insurance agents, the CEO said.

Asked whether the company has plans to acquire smaller companies with its IPO funds, Jones told TechCrunch that it could be “opportunistic” regarding buying tech platforms, or smaller teams with particular talent. For the many startups competing in other parts of the insurance marketplace world — TechCrunch has covered the space extensively, including a bevy of funding rounds for insurtech startups — a newly wealthy public company could provide an interesting exit opportunity.

The company’s strong IPO pricing, if somewhat slack first-day’s trading, feels akin to a wash for related, smaller firms watching its public offering with interest; how GoHealth trades moving forward could help set the tone for select insurtech startup valuations.

For today, however, we have yet another unicorn tech-ish offering all wrapped up. GoHealth’s path to the public market’s wasn’t as straightforward as some, but it got there all the same.

A number of high-profile Twitter accounts were simultaneously hacked on Wednesday by attackers who used the accounts — some with millions of followers — to spread a cryptocurrency scam.

@bitcoin, @ripple, @coindesk, @coinbase, and @binance were among the accounts hacked with the same message: “We have partnered with CryptoForHealth and are giving back 5000 BTC to the community,” followed by a link to a website, which we are not linking to.

Some of the accounts were quickly back under their owners’ control with tweets were quickly deleted. At the time of writing, both Binance and Bitcoin still had a tweet promoting the scam.

The scammer’s website was quickly flagged by Cloudflare as a phishing site, but still accessible when clicked-through.

Many other accounts were quickly hijacked, including @elonmusk. The tweet posted to the Tesla and SpaceX founder’s account simply directed users to send bitcoin to a certain address under the guise that he will “double any payment” — a known cryptocurrency scam technique.

These kinds of scams are common. Scammers take over high-profile Twitter accounts using breached or leaked passwords and post messages that encourage users to post their cryptocurrency funds to a particular address under the guise that they’ll double their “investment.” In reality, it’s simple theft, but it’s a scam that works. By the time of writing, the blockchain address used on the scam site had already collected 2.8 bitcoin — some $25,700 in today’s currency — and it’s going up by the minute.

A spokesperson for Binance told TechCrunch: “The security team is actively investigating the situation of this coordinated attack on the crypto industry.” Several other companies affected by the account hacks did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s not immediately known how the account hacks took place. Security researchers, however, found that the attackers had fully taken over the victims’ accounts, and also changed the email address associated with the account to make it harder for the real user to regain access.

Scammers frequently reply to high-profile accounts, like celebrities and public figures, to hijack the conversation and hoodwink unsuspecting victims. Twitter typically shuts these accounts down pretty fast.

A Twitter spokesperson, when reached, said the company was “looking into” the matter but didn’t immediately comment.

Virgin Galactic is shuffling its uppermost leadership ahead of the private space tourism company’s commercial service launch: It just announced Michael Colglazier, who had been President and Managing Director of Disney Parks International, will join as the new Virgin Galactic CEO, replacing George Whitesides who will assume the newly-created position of Chief Space Officer.

Whitesides said on Twitter that the move is in anticipation of the company’s move to debut its commercial service. Virgin Galactic is in the final test flight stages at its operational spaceport in New Mexico. It has already flown unpowered test flights of its launch vehicle carrier aircraft and the SpaceShipTwo suborbital spaceplane, and will next move to powered flight tests prior to kicking off flights for its paying ticket-holders.

Whitesides was the first CEO of both Virgin Galactic and The Spaceship Company (a subsidiary formed specifically to focus on Virgin spacecraft manufacture). Virgin Galactic was originally founded by Richard Branson, who also provided significant funding to the company ahead of its public debut last year via a special purpose acquisition company (SPAC) created by Chamath Palihapitiya specifically for the purpose.

Colglazier’s experience at Disney in the Parks department should be a clear signal about the direction Virgin Galactic is headed with its human spaceflight business. The company has always put a lot of emphasis on the overall ‘experience’ it provides its private space tourists, including ground activities and training, and installing an executive who was responsible for one of the world’s foremost ‘experience’-based tourism operations.

The background of departing CEO Whitesides is very different: He was Chief of Staff at NASA prior to joining Virgin Galactic in 2010, and his new position as Chief Space Officer, as well as chair of the company’s Space Advisory Board, does seem to make a lot more sense given his experience, relative to the company’s goals as an ongoing, revenue generating business. Whitesides will also step down from the Virgin Galactic board of directors as part of this shift, and Colglazier will join that guidance body.

The executive changes take effect on July 20, the company says. It reports its next results on August 3, and while it now looks like we’ll probably have to wait until next year to see it begin its first commercial tourist flights, it’s likely that the status of its program and progress will be in focus.

Navistar and TuSimple deepened their two-year relationship on Wednesday, announcing plans to develop and begin producing autonomous semi trucks by 2024.

The strategic partnership includes Navistar taking an undisclosed stake in self-driving trucks startup TuSimple. The plan is to move away from retrofitting the Navistar International commercial trucks that TuSimple currently uses and instead develop semi trucks specifically designed for autonomous operations.

“Autonomous technology is entering our industry and will have a profound impact on our customers’ businesses,” said Navistar CEO and President Persio Lisboa said in a statement, adding that the partnership positions it to be a leader in developing and offering products that meet their customers’ needs.

Customers will be able to purchase the fully autonomous trucks through Navistar’s traditional sales channels in the United States, Canada and Mexico, the companies said Wednesday.

The arrangement is important for both companies. TuSimple needs a dedicated trucks manufacturer where it can park its technology platform if it hopes to launch truly driverless commercial operations that are safe and ultimately profitable. And Navistar is betting TuSimple is the company that will help it stand out and pull ahead of OEM competitors Daimler Trucks North America and Volvo Group.

TuSimple President Cheng Lu is bullish on the partnership, stating that together there is a clear path to commercialize self-driving Class 8 trucks at scale.

However, TuSimple and Navistar aren’t alone in this pursuit. A wave of autonomous trucking startups including Ike and Kodiak has popped up in recent years. And more AV technology companies such as Aurora and Waymo are either expanding their focus to include driverless trucking or shifting away from business models like robotaxis that involve transporting people.

TuSimple, which is also backed by Sina, Nvidia, UPS and Tier 1 supplier Mando Corporation, operates a fleet of 40 self-driving trucks in the U.S. that are used for testing and to carry freight between Arizona and Texas. The trucks always have two safety engineers on board.

The strategic partnership comes as TuSimple is seeking to raise at least $250 million in new funding. The company has hired investment bank Morgan Stanley to help it raise the funds.

The search for funding kicked off around the same time that TuSimple unveiled a plan to create a mapped network of shipping routes and terminals designed for autonomous trucking operations that will extend across the United States by 2024 — the same year that Navistar aims to start production of those trucks.

UPS, which also owns a minority stake in TuSimple, carrier U.S. Xpress, Penske Truck Leasing and Berkshire Hathaway’s grocery and food service supply chain company McLane Inc. are the inaugural partners in this so-called autonomous freight network (AFN).

TuSimple’s AFN involves four pieces: its self-driving trucks, digital mapped routes, freight terminals and a system that will let customers monitor autonomous trucking operations and track their shipments in real-time.

TuSimple said it plans to demonstrate completely driverless operations in 2021.

What if you could mix and match different tracks from your favorite artists, or create new ones on your own with their voices?

This could become a reality sooner than later, as AI models similar to the ones used to create computer-generated art images and embed deepfakes in videos are being increasingly applied to music.

The use of algorithms to create music is not new. Researchers used computer programs to generate piano sheet music as far back as the 1950s, and musicians from that era such as Iannis Xenakis and Gottfried Koenig even used them to compose their own music.

What has changed are the improvements in generative algorithms, which first gained popularity back in 2014, coupled with large amounts of compute power that are increasingly changing what computers can do with music today.

OpenAI recently released a project called JukeBox, which uses the complex raw audio form to help create entirely new music tracks based on a person’s choice of genre, artist and lyrics. Meanwhile, tools such as Amazon’s AWS DeepComposer and ones released by the Google Magenta project are helping to democratize the ability for developers to experiment with deep learning algorithms and music.

With respect to commercial use, startups such as Amper Music, which lets users create customized, royalty-free music, are seeing businesses adopt computer-generated pieces for a range of use cases surrounding background tracks for videos, and record labels have started to play around with music written by AI.

As the technology and quality of computer-generated music matures, it will likely bring a lot of changes to the media industry from individual artists to record labels to music streaming companies, and present a slew of legal questions over computer-generated music rights.