Author: azeeadmin

SocialChorus, a startup that helps distribute communications internally in a similar way marketers reach customers externally, announced a $100 million investment today led by Sumeru Equity Partners. With this investment, the firm has bought a majority stake in the company. As part of today’s deal, Sumeru will be adding three members to the SocialChorus board.

“Sumeru Equity Partners is making a majority investment in the company but also well capitalizing the business for future growth,” Mark Haller, principal at Sumeru told TechCrunch.

The company previously raised $47 million, according to Crunchbase data. Haller says this is not a buyout, so much as a partnership with those previous investors. “We’re seeing continued partnership with existing investors and we’re coming in and making that majority investment, and we’ll also be making another investment in the balance sheet,” he said.

What Sumeru is getting is a company that helps with internal communications using marketing techniques, says company CEO Gary Nakamura. “You can run campaigns with targeting segmentation and all the telemetry back that you need as a leader, as a manager, as an organization to understand how your communications are landing with your workforce,” Nakamura told TechCrunch.

The target is large companies and customers include big names like Ford, Archer Daniels Midland and Boeing. The company reports it has 120 large customers around the world, and the business has been growing at 50% year over year.

While the company is getting this infusion of cash from Sumeru, Nakamura says he will continue to try and manage the company in a thoughtful way, and that means being careful about how they hire beyond the 120 employees the company already has.

“What we have built is a business that doesn’t require a lot of heads to run it. We can maintain a 50% growth rate with financial discipline that we’ve implemented. Historically that is what we’ve been able to do,” he said.

Sumeru Equity Partners is a private equity firm based in San Francisco. It targets mid-market companies, according to the company website and then tries to apply operational efficiency by working with them on areas like product strategy, go-to-market acceleration and organizational development with the goal of building up the company and taking it to exit.

The founders of the alternative dairy protein manufacturer, Perfect Day, have joined with a longtime product developer in the dairy industry to create a new sustainably focused consumer food company called the Urgent Company.

Focused on creating sustainable food brands manufactured, packaged and sold in a more environmentally friendly way, the Urgent Company is unveiling its first product — Brave Robot ice cream.

It’s also the first indication of how Perfect Day will deploy some of the massive amounts of money it raised since it closed on its mammoth $300 million funding round led by the Canadian Pension Plan Investment Board with additional commitments from Temasek and Horizons Ventures.

Perfect Day founders Ryan Pandya and Perumal Gandhi first met their Urgent Company co-founder and general manager, Paul Kollessoff, when Kollessoff was performing due diligence on Perfect Day while working for the Irish dairy company Glanbia.

“What I was doing there was actually looking at new business ventures,” said Kollessoff. “I met the guys three years ago when we were doing some flavor work with them.”

The conversation ended there while Pandya and Gandhi built up Perfect Day, but around three months ago the two founders reached back out with idea for a new consumer food company, based on the latest in plant-based, or genetically modified proteins (including their own), that also used the latest in packaging technology, logistics, and other technologies to reduce the entire carbon footprint of a CPG company. 

Image Credit: The Urgent Company

“It’s not that we are trying to create a company that’s going to commercialize Perfect Day proteins,” said Pandya. “There are so many other things across the value chain of food that need to be improved and modernized including all of the things around how a food gets to the consumer.”

So Brave Robot’s commitment to sustainability extends beyond the use of alternative proteins to replace animal husbandry and the particularly ecologically disastrous dairy industry and its cows. “There’s a load of exciting stuff going on in ingredient innovation and packaging innovation,” said Kollessoff.

Those innovations help The Urgent Company not only become more sustainable, but give the company the ability to move products into the market more quickly, according to Kollessoff.

With only eight full-time members of the Urgent Company staff it managed to shepherd its ice cream business from inception to product launch within a three-month timeframe according to Kollessoff.

Co-founders of Perfect Day, Ryan Pandya (L) and Perumal Gandhi (R), showcase the prospective product portfolio fueled by its flora-based dairy protein. Image Credit: Business Wire. 

So Brave Robot will be launching with a direct to consumer pitch for its dairy-replacement pints of ice cream for a $5.99 price point. Initially available to customers in the California region, any number of buyers are talking to the company, Kollessoff said. “We’ll be on store shelves through the next month. Working with a national broker… we will have a direct to consumer platform as well.”

Before anything could happen with bringing a product to commercial scale, Kollessoff said he had to go through a rigorous process of testing the product — with his kids. At one point, there were 400 pints of ice cream in the Kollessoff freezer. He and his team whittled the initial over thirty flavors of ice cream and settled on a core group of eight.

They include: Vanilla, A Lot of Chocolate, Vanilla ‘N Cookies, Buttery Pecan, PB ‘N Fudge, Blueberry Pie, Hazelnut Chocolate Chunk and Raspberry White Truffle.

“We wanted to create something that is bigger and broader in vision that can bring innovation across the board,” said Gandhi of the drive to build another business with a broader scope than Perfect Day. “What Perfect Day is focusing on …we made cow 2.0… we’ve reimagined the cow… [but] we want [The Urgent Company] to use any protein on planet earth.”

Part of the reason why the company is so unfettered is to encourage speedy experimentation for the simple reason that there’s not much time to take the steps needed to slow down — and ideally reverse — climate change.

“You only get so much time on earth… and we wanted to do more… That’s why it’s called the urgent company.. [because] let’s hurry the fuck up world.”

Zoom has become the de facto standard for online communications during the pandemic, but the company has found that it’s still a struggle for many employees to set up the equipment and the software to run a meeting effectively. The company’s answer is an all-in-one communications appliance with Zoom software ready to roll in a simple touch interface.

The device dubbed the Zoom for Home – DTEN ME, is being produced by partner DTEN. It consists of a stand-alone 27 inch screen, essentially a large tablet equipped with three wide-angle cameras designed for high-resolution video and 8 microphones. Zoom software is pre-loaded on the device and the interface is designed to provide easy access to popular Zoom features.

Zoom for Home – DTEN ME with screen sharing on. Image Credit: Zoom

Jeff Smith, head of Zoom Rooms, says that the idea is to offer an appliance that you can pull out of the box and it’s ready to use with minimal fuss. “Zoom for Home is an initiative from Zoom that allows any Zoom user to deploy a personal collaboration device for their video meetings, phone calls, interactive whiteboard annotation — all the good stuff that you want to do on Zoom, you can do with a dedicated purpose-built device,” Smith told TechCrunch.

He says this is designed with simplicity in mind, so that you pull it out of the box and launch the interface by entering a pairing code on a website on your laptop or mobile phone. Once the interface appears, you simply touch the function you want such as making a phone call or starting a meeting and it connects automatically.

Image Credits: Zoom

You can link it to your calendar so that all your meetings appear in a sidebar, and you just touch the next meeting to connect. If you need to share your screen it includes ultrasonic pairing between the appliance and your laptop or mobile phone. This works like Bluetooth, but instead of sending out a radio signal, it sends out a sound between 18 and 22 kHz, which most people can’t hear, to connect the two devices, Smith said.

Smith says Zoom will launch with two additional partners including the Neat Bar and the Poly Studio X Series, and could add other partners in the future.

The DTEN appliance will cost $599 and works with an existing Zoom license. The company is taking pre-orders and the devices are expected to ship next month.

Seattle-based space ride share service provider Spaceflight Inc. revealed its next-generation orbital transfer vehicle today, the Sherpa-FX. The new spacecraft acts as a deployment spacecraft for combined payloads on rideshare rocket launches – essentially providing last-mile transportation from the point at which the launch vehicle deploys the combined payload, to the actual desired target deployment orbit of each satellite sharing the ride to space.

The Sherpa-FX will fly its debut mission on an upcoming SpaceX rideshare mission, currently set to take off as early as December 2020. The inaugural flight of the Spaceflight orbital transfer vehicle will carry 16 small spacecraft from a number of different companies and organizations, including one for NASA and one for the University of South Florida’s Institute of Applied Engineering.

This is the first spacecraft that has resulted from Spaceflights’ Sherpa-NG program, which is dedicated to developing and deploying next-generation technology for payload deployment and management from the point of primary payload deployment from a contracted launch vehicle from providers like SpaceX . This is a key step in ensuring that rideshare models work for payload operators, since while combining payloads on a single rocket is great for defraying the cost of launch, it’s far from ideal for actually ensuring your spacecraft ends up in the orbit where it’ll actually be operating.

Companies like Rocket Lab, which employs a dedicated rideshare model for its main business, have their own orbital transfer vehicles, as do operators who deploy larger payloads for single customers. Spaceflight’s entire business is predicated on supplying the technology and services necessary to take companies like SpaceX, as well as Rocket Lab, and offer even more flexibility and optimization in terms of supporting a larger number of deployments from a single launch.

Spaceflight, Inc. was acquired earlier this year by Japanese industrial giant Mistui & Co, but continues to operate independently out of its U.S. HQ with the same operational goal in mind.

Scooters, a common sight on the streets of Taiwan, give commuters an alternative to cars in the country’s densely-populated cities. But they also contribute to pollution and jam-packed parking spaces. Over the past few year, several companies haven taken on the challenge of creating more environmentally-friendly alternatives to traditional gas scooters. Gogoro is probably best-known internationally for its electric SmartScooters, which are now the category’s top-sellers in Taiwan. While less known outside of the country, however, scooter-sharing startup WeMo has grown steadily since launching in 2016. It now has a fleet of more than 7,000 scooters in three of Taiwan’s biggest cities and says users take about one million rides per month.

WeMo recently announced it has raised a multi-million Series A led by AppWorks, making it the Taiwanese venture capital firm’s first smart mobility investment. The funding is being used to expand beyond Taipei City, New Taipei City and Kaohsiung, WeMo’s current markets, with plans to go international, too, launching first in Southeast Asian countries.

In Taiwan, WeMo competes with iRent, a car and scooter rental service, as well as GoShare, the mobility-sharing platform Gogoro launched a year ago.

WeMo co-founder and chief executive officer Jeffrey Wu told TechCrunch that his company differentiates because from the beginning, it has focused on creating smart tech specifically for sharing scooters.

Instead of developing their own electric vehicles, like Gogoro, WeMo partnered with Kymco, one of Taiwan’s largest scooters brands. Each scooter is equipped with an internet-connected black box that was developed in-house by WeMo.

The black boxes enable WeMo to manage its fleet’s batteries, while providing data from rides, including traffic and road quality (for example, it detects when streets are bumpy) that can be shared with policymakers to improve transportation infrastructure. The black boxes also connect with WeMo’s user app, showing where scooters are available, unlocking them and sending alerts about traffic conditions.

WeMo began working on its service in 2015, about a year before launching with an initial fleet of 200 vehicles. Before cofounding WeMo, Wu was a consultant at McKinsey and Company.

“I was going back to my background of being a strategy consultant and at the time, my co-founder and I decided we wanted to do something in Taiwan that was very different from how people had practiced business in the past, because there were a lot of different macro-trends changing the environment,” he said.

“Obviously the shared economy sector was just booming and at the same time, mobile-first technology was beginning to prevail. But we realized that the transportation sector had not changed in a very, very long time, so we thought if we are able to use the sharing economy or pay-as-you-go concept coupled with green vehicles, and provide that on a massive scale to consumers, we could move to a greener, smarter and more convenient form of transportation.”

Wu also sensed a market opportunity because of the number of unused scooters he saw parked on the side of streets day after day. Despite being one of the most common transportation methods in Taiwan, finding parking in major cities is often a hassle, which means many scooters are underutilized.

WeMo fleets are located in parking lots, and scooters can be unlocked through the user app. Rental fees have different tiers, including per minute and hourly rates and monthly plans. The app is available in Chinese and English, to serve local riders as well as tourists. Riders can also now register accounts and rent scooters through LINE, the most widely-used messaging app in Taiwan.

To prepare for expanding into new markets, Wu said part of WeMo’s new funding is being used to expand its research and development center in Taiwan. The company plans to hire up to 100 hardware and software engineers, especially ones who have experience in self-driving technology, vehicle telematics and machine learning. Wu said WeMo’s plan is to be a “mobility-as-a-service” platform, working with partners to launch scooter-sharing services in new markets.

“Over the past five years, people have become used to shared mobility services, but five years ago it wasn’t such a developed space, so we had to come up with the technology and applications,” Wu said. “Now we’re looking at what the future of mobility should look like, and how we use IoT technology to expand outside of transportation and use our data to help users maneuver more easily in their cities.”

Virtual card payment startup Privacy.com has raised $10.2 million in a Series A fundraise, the company announced Wednesday.

The round was led by Teamworthy Ventures, with participation from Tusk Venture Partners, Index Ventures, Quiet Capital, Exor Seeds, and Rainfall Ventures.

The startup, if you’re unfamiliar, lets anyone generate virtual and disposable payment card numbers for free, allowing those users to keep their actual credit card number safe while allowing the option to cut off companies from your bank account. In an age of near-constant data breaches and credit card skimmers targeting unsuspecting websites, Privacy.com makes it harder for hackers to get your real credit card details.

It’s a popular idea. In the past three years, Privacy.com has issued 5 million virtual card numbers using its

Privacy.com’s chief executive Bo Jiang told TechCrunch that the new funds will help the company launch its new Card Issuing API — in beta testing for the past year — allowing corporate customers to issue virtual cards and manage expenses for their employees in their own back-end systems.

“We’re the first company that allows developers to see upfront, transparent revenue sharing and sign up and create cards programmatically the same day,” he said.

Privacy.com will primarily serve early-stage enterprise companies, which “traditionally need a lighter weight solution for their online payments,” said Jiang. “It’s an underserved market, because most incumbents focus on the larger enterprise with monthly minimums and long timeframes.”

Jiang also said the round will help the company “hire and ramp up product development at a much faster pace” as part of its push to serve more enterprise customers.

Lemonade today launched pet insurance, marking its entry into a new vertical of insurance for the first time since it launched its renters/home owners insurance in 2016.

Lemonade CEO Daniel Schreiber told TechCrunch back in February that some 70 percent of Lemonade customers with a home owners or renters policy are also pet owners, and yet between 1 and 2 percent of pet owners in the United States have pet insurance.

It’s a relatively straightforward Venn diagram.

Pet insurance from Lemonade will cost users $12/month, with a 10 percent discount available to existing Lemonade policy holders who choose to bundle their new pet insurance with home/renters insurance. The policy is only available to dog and cat owners — other pets are not covered.

The policy covers blood tests, urinalysis, x-rays, MRIs, labwork, CT scans and ultrasounds, as well as outpatient, specialty and emergency care procedures, along with hospitalization and surgery, according to the Lemonade website. The company also covers medication, including injections and prescription meds. Pet owners can also get an extended Accident and Illness Package that goes beyond the initial coverage of accidental road accidents and poisonings, and a variety illnesses.

Lemonade Pet Insurance comes with an optional wellness package, as well, which provides savings for routine stuff like an annual physical checkup, heartworm tests, fecal tests, annual parasite evaluation tests, Bloodwork, and up to three vaccines. The wellness package also gives pet owners access to medical advice chat and offers reminders and tips to keep their pet healthy.

“Health insurance for pets dates back to over 100 years ago,” Schreiber told TechCrunch in February. “It started with horses in the Netherlands, and the heir to that pet insurance is actually car insurance. Horses were a mode of transportation, and the insurance was meant to protect you if something happened to that mode of transportation. But pets are now members of the family.”

According to Fortune, Americans spent upwards of $75 billion on their pets in 2019.

Insurance policies in general are also quite antiquated, with legal requirements to use language and clauses written decades ago. Lemonade has been trying to launch its Policy 2.0 — a simply worded policy that is open-sourced, allowing anyone to contribute or suggest changes to it — in the United States. Policy 2.0 is currently only available in Europe, but it marks a big change in the way insurance is handled as one of the biggest issues in the industry is that policy holders simply don’t, and in some cases can’t, know what is and is not covered.

This launch comes at a time when Lemonade has just entered the public market, with a big pop in its first day of trading.

Alongside its public offering, Lemonade has raised $480 million in institutional investment from firms like Sequoia, Allianz, and others, with a team of 382 employees globally.

On the US team, 35% of full time employees are people of color; 61% are women. Globally, Lemonade is 49% women; a quarter of the R&D team are women, and the executive team is 33% women. The 8-member board includes one person of color and one woman.

The General Court of the European Court of Justice has annulled an EU decision that involved Apple’s subsidiaries in Ireland. Four years ago, the European Commission said that Ireland had failed to collect €13 billion in taxes from Apple — roughly $15 billion.

According to the press statement, “the Commission did not succeed in showing to the requisite legal standard that there was an advantage for the purposes of Article 107(1) TFEU [Treaty of the Functioning of the European Union].”

Back in 2017, the Commission said Apple received illegal state aid and should have paid more taxes. But the General Court, Europe’s first instance court, says that this argument doesn’t represent a legal basis.

“According to the General Court, the Commission was wrong to declare that [Apple Sales International] and [Apple Operations Europe] had been granted a selective economic advantage and, by extension, State aid,” the court wrote in a statement.

Today’s decision represents a blow to the European Commission’s strategy to track down multinational corporations that have been optimizing their tax structure in order to lower their effective tax rate across Europe — a strategy that was mostly incarnated by then Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager.

Between 2003 and 2014, Apple operated with two main subsidiaries in Europe — Apple Sales International and Apple Operations Europe. Back then, the Commission said those subsidiaries attributed the vast majority of their profit to a head office that only exists on paper. “This selective treatment allowed Apple to pay an effective corporate tax rate of 1 per cent on its European profits in 2003 down to 0.005 per cent in 2014,” Vestager wrote in 2016.

Apple’s arguments have always been quite straightforward. According to the company, Ireland never cut a deal with Apple. “The opinion issued on August 30th alleges that Ireland gave Apple a special deal on our taxes. This claim has no basis in fact or in law. We never asked for, nor did we receive, any special deals,” Apple CEO Tim Cook said in 2016.

While Apple has continuously maintained that it complies with tax laws in Europe, it took advantage of favorable tax laws in Ireland and the so-called Double Irish tax structure.

As tax optimization schemes come and go, Apple changed its European structure in 2014. Apple Sales International and Apple Operations International moved its cash stockpile to the tiny island of Jersey.

In 2018, Apple started allocating money in case it had to pay back €13 billion to Ireland. Everything is currently sitting in an escrow account. The defeated side can still appeal the decision on points of law, so the money might remain in the escrow account a little longer.

Neobank Revolut launched in the U.S. a couple of months ago. The startup is slowly catching up with features that are available in the U.K. and Europe. This time, Revolut is adding cryptocurrency trading through a partnership with Paxos.

Users in the U.S. can now buy, hold and sell Bitcoin and Ethereum from the Revolut app. The feature is going to be available in 49 states as there are some regulatory issues in Tennessee. If you have USD or other currencies in your Revolut account, you can exchange manually whenever you want.

You can also set up alerts in case there are some important price changes happening. Optionally, users can also round up card payments to the nearest whole dollar and convert spare change into crypto assets.

If you’re familiar with Revolut’s cryptocurrency feature, you know that the company gives you access to more cryptocurrencies in Europe, such as Litecoin, Bitcoin Cash and XRP. The company says it is starting with BTC and ETH in the U.S. but is already working on bringing more cryptocurrencies.

When it comes to fees, users with a free Revolut account will pay 2.5% in conversion fees. Users with a Premium and Metal subscription will pay 1.5% in fees. Revolut is waving fees for the first 30 days.

This is in line with the company’s current fees in Europe. Revolut also has some monthly limits on currency exchange in general for free users as well — it can be fiat currencies or cryptocurrencies. You have to pay a 0.5% fee above that limit or pay for a subscription.

Revolut made some changes to its cryptocurrency feature recently. While you now technically own your cryptocurrencies, you can’t send and receive cryptocurrencies from third-party wallets. The feature is all about trading — buying, holding and selling.

In the U.S., Square’s Cash App and Robinhood also let you buy cryptocurrencies in their respective app. While those features don’t offer the same flexibility as a full-fledged cryptocurrency exchange, it makes it easy to get started with cryptocurrencies.