Author: azeeadmin

Google has become the latest high-profile investor in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms. The search giant is investing $4.5 billion for a 7.7% stake in the top Indian telecom network, Reliance Jio Platforms chairman said on Wednesday.

More to follow…

Google has become the latest high-profile investor in India’s Reliance Jio Platforms. The search giant is investing $4.5 billion for a 7.7% stake in the top Indian telecom network, Reliance Jio Platforms chairman said on Wednesday.

More to follow…

There is a lot riding on the use of artificial intelligence technology to help us take giant leaps ahead in solving complex challenges — whether it’s medical breakthroughs, building better cybersecurity, or better navigation systems for cars and other moving objects. But the more advanced the application, the bigger the need for hardware that can handle the calculations and processing; and that means the race is on for ever-more powerful processing. Now, the UK startup Graphcore is announcing its latest contribution to that effort.

Today, it is announcing a new chip, the GC200, and a new IPU Machine that runs on it, the M2000, which Graphcore says is the first AI computer to achieve a petaflop of processing power “in the size of a pizza box.”

Graphcore says that there are no plans for the GC200 to be sold separately, and it will come only in the M2000. Nigel Toon, the CEO and co-founder, said the M2000 is now shipping to early access customers and will be more widely by the end of this year to customers in applications in areas like financial services, healthcare, technology and more, “wherever AI is used.”

This is the second generation of Graphcore’s hardware to be released, and its first in just under two years, Toon notes.

The IPU Machine uses four of the 7nm GC200 IPU chips, with the GC200 featuring 59.4 billion transistors on each chip. Potentially, Graphcore says that up to 64,000 IPUs can be connected together to create a vast parallel processor of up to 16 exaflops of computing power and petabytes of memory to support models with trillions of parameters. The idea is that these can be scaled up as necessary.

The moves come at a key moment both for Graphcore and the AI hardware industry. The UK upstart  competes against leviathans in the world of processors like Nvidia and Intel — Graphcore raised a further $150 million in May at a nearly $2 billion valuation to compete against them, and Toon says the $450 million it’s raised so far is enough for now, with customers like Microsoft and others already on its books — but also a plethora of other companies building AI chips. And it was only in May that Nvidia unveiled its own latest chip, the A100, its first Ampere-based GPU that promises 5 petaflops of performance.

Graphcore and its leader Toon — who, with his co-founder Simon Knowles, had sold a previous startup called Icera to Nvidia — argue that its IPU approach is more efficient and advanced than the GPU route that Nvidia is taking.

“We are trying to build products that are easy to put into your existing compute infrastructure,” he said. “It means you can scale up to thousands of IPU processors.” And, he added, that means that the cost of ownership can be 10-20 times lower for the IPU approach, which in turn translates to faster take-up of the hardware.

Toon says that while other chipmakers continue to work on a number of other processing applications in parallel with AI — for example for mobile devices, or quantum chips — Graphcore is remaining firmly focused on AI applications, which he says remains a “massive opportunity for us to grow our business and add more customers.”

“We’re 100% focused on silicon processors for AI, and on building systems that can plug into existing centers. Why would we want to build CPUs or GPUs if those already work well? This is just a different toolbox.” He said he believes it will be a 10-15 year window before quantum or molecular computing to come along, a trajectory that might pose a lot of challenges for smaller startups trying to build in that area against biggies like IBM. 

Toon noted that AI stands among the trends that the COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated — not just  around the many applications being pursued around the health crisis and fighting the virus itself, but also around working and improving processes for other services resulting from that.

“We’ll probably burn $100 million more investing in technology and people” — the company now has 450 employees, Toon noted, “but our revenues are also ramping, and the $300 million in cash we have today should be sufficient to get us to a a fast and profitable business.”

Ravelin, the London-based company using machine learning to help companies fight fraud when accepting online payments, has raised $20 million in new funding.

The Series C round is led by Draper Esprit, with participation from existing investors Amadeus Capital Partners, BlackFin Tech, and Passion Capital. Ravelin disclosed $10 million in Series B funding in September 2018.

Launched in 2016, Ravelin utilises machine learning and graph network technologies to help online businesses reduce losses to fraud and improve acceptance rates of orders. The idea is to do away with cruder, rule-based systems and use machine learning to negate false positives and give merchants more confidence accepting customers/transactions.

With regards to product-market fit, Ravelin says it first found success with large-scale food and cab-ride marketplaces, but has since expanded into travel, ticketing, entertainment, gaming, gambling, and retail. In addition to identifying card fraud, Ravelin also works with clients to find compromised accounts (referred to as “account takeover”), spot incentive abuse and tackle supplier fraud in marketplaces.

Account takeover is where fraudsters use credentials that have been exposed in data breaches to take over an individual’s online account for their own use or to sell on the dark web. “We have a product that helps secure accounts in the first place, identify at risk accounts and help the merchant reclaim the account for the original user,” explains Ravelin’s chief marketing officerGerry Carr. “It’s a complex problem and due to the ease that it can be done, a fast growing issue”.

Incentive abuse sees users re-using and/or sharing vouchers and sign-up incentives to defraud a merchant. To prevent this, Ravelin is able to map out the network of users and their associated voucher codes to spot if a voucher is already used by another user and block it.

Supplier fraud typically affects marketplaces where the customer, the courier or the product supplier is working to defraud the marketplace. “There are many ways this can happen,” says Carr, “a simple example might be a supplier uses a fake account to place an order with cash delivery. In this scenario the marketplace advances the restaurant the payment. Once they receive the payment, the restaurant cancels the order and keeps the payment. We can help a marketplace identify anomalous activity in the network and put a stop to fraudulent behaviour”.

Ravelin is also developing “Ravelin Accept,” a product aimed at helping businesses navigate PDS2 and confidently accept rather than reject more transactions. PSD2 means there will be a lot more authentication required for transactions.

“This risks a lot of failed transactions as consumers struggle with the step-up authentication and merchants are unsure about how to get exemptions to the secure authentication,” explains Carr. “Ravelin Accept will have built-in intelligence about how the major issuers like to manage transactions. It will route a transaction to an exemption to authentication where possible, and where it is not, [it] will manage that step-up dynamically to give it the best chance of acceptance. The hard deadline of PSD2 at the end of this year should see significant demand for Ravelin Accept to help with acceptance rates”.

Meanwhile, Ravelin says it will use its Series C round to further invest in these innovations, and to reach more markets and industries globally.

Comments Draper Esprit’s Vinoth Jayakumar: “Our model is to invest in innovation over the long term. Ravelin perfectly aligns with that thesis. The team at Ravelin are world-class and continue to work to push the boundaries of their products… What got us really excited was the range of problems they solve for clients and the suite of products they are developing”.

Nissan unveiled today the Ariya, an all-electric SUV with an estimated 300 miles of range and a starting price tag of $40,000 that marks the beginning of a four-year plan aiming for growth and profitability.

The Nissan Ariya will first be sold in Japan in mid-2021, before heading to dealerships in the U.S. and Canada later in the year, the company said in digital event in Yokohama, Japan.

The unveiling is a milestone for a company that has been embroiled in controversy for more than year, following the arrest and subsequent escape of Carlos Ghosn, the former chairman of the Nissan Group and the Renault–Nissan–Mitsubishi Alliance.

It’s also the first all-electric to come out of Nissan since the early EV pioneer introduced the Leaf hatchback a decade ago. Nissan was an early EV pioneer and has sold nearly 500,000 Leaf vehicles since 2010. But any early dominance in the industry has been overshadowed by the rise of Tesla as well as other electric models from established OEMs. Now Nissan aiming to get back in a leading position.

The Ariya is no Leaf. This is a more mature, refined crossover with a sleek and simple design and an interior featuring thin profile “Zero Gravity” seats that are meant to give off an upscale vibe. It also puts tech front and center with an emphasis on natural voice controls, Amazon Alexa and wireless Apple CarPlay and Android Auto to let drivers integrate their smartphones with the infotainment system.

The upshot: Nissan is counting on the Ariya to help drive its turnaround.

“The company expects sales of its EVs and e-POWER electrified models to be more than 1 million units a year by the end of fiscal 2023. The Ariya will play a significant role in attaining that goal,” COO Ashwani Gupta said during the digital event unveiling the new SUV.

The vehicle will feature Nissan’s next-generation driver assistance system called ProPILOT, which uses driver attention monitoring to enable hands-off single-lane highway operation. There is an array of other driver assist features, including automatic emergency braking with pedestrian detection, rear automatic braking, lane departure warning, blind spot warning, rear cross traffic alert and high beam assist. The Ariya will also include a monitor that provides a full 360 view and a forward collision warning.

The Ariya will be available in all-wheel or two-wheel drive versions; that 300 miles of range is Nissan’s estimate based on the 2WD version. Importantly, Nissan is ditching the CHAdeMO DC fast charging standard in Europe and the U.S. and is instead opting for the competing Combined Charging System (CCS) standard for these markets.

 

Layer is not trying to replace Excel or Google Sheets. Instead the Berlin-based productivity startup wants to make life easier for those whose job entails wrangling massive spreadsheets and managing data inputs from across an organization — such as for budgeting, financial reporting or HR functions — by adding a granular control access layer on top.

The idea for a ‘SaaS to supercharge spreadsheets’ came to the co-founders as a result of their own experience of workflow process pain-points at the place they used to work, as is often the case with productivity startups.

“Constantin [Schünemann] and I met at Helpling, the marketplace for cleaning services, where I was the company’s CFO and I had to deal with spreadsheets on a daily level,” explains co-founder Moritz ten Eikelder. “There was one particular reference case for what we’re building here — the update of the company’s financial model and business case which was a 20MB Excel file with 30 different tabs, hundreds of roles of assumptions. It was a key steering tool for management and founders. It was also the basis for the financial reporting.

“On average it needed to be updated twice per month. And that required input by around about 20-25 people across the organization. So right then about 40 different country managers and various department heads. The problem was we could not share the entire file with [all the] people involved because it contained a lot of very sensitive information like salary data, cash burn, cash management etc.”

While sharing a Dropbox link to the file with the necessary individuals so they could update the sheet with their respective contributions would have risked breaking the master file. So instead he says they created individual templates and “carve outs” for different contributors. But this was still far from optimal from a productivity point of view. Hence feeling the workflow burn — and their own entrepreneurial itch.

“Once all the input was collected from the stakeholders you would start a very extensive and tedious copy paste exercise — where you would copy from these 25 difference sources and insert them data into your master file in order to create an up to date version,” says ten Eikelder, adding: “The pain points are pretty clear. It’s an extremely time consuming and tedious process… And it’s extremely prone to error.”

Enter Layer: A web app that’s billed as a productivity platform for spreadsheets which augments rather than replaces them — sitting atop Microsoft Excel and Google Sheets files and bringing in a range of granular controls.

The idea is to offer a one-stop shop for managing access and data flows around multi-stakeholder spreadsheets, enabling access down to individual cell level and aiding collaboration and overall productivity around these key documents by streamlining the process of making and receiving data input requests.

“You start off by uploading an Excel file to our web application. In that web app you can start to build workflows across a feature spectrum,” says Schünemann — noting, for example, that the web viewer allows users to drag the curser to highlight a range of cells they wish to share.

“You can do granular user provisioning on top of that where in the offline world you’d have to create manual carve outs or manual copies of that file to be able to shield away data for example,” he goes on. “On top of that you can then request input [via an email asking for a data submission].

“Your colleagues keep on working in their known environments and then once he has submitted input we’ve built something that is very similar to a track changes functionality in Word. So you as a master user could review all changes in the Layer app — regardless of whether they’re coming through Excel or Google Sheets… And then we’ve built a consolidation feature so that you don’t need to manually copy-paste from different spreadsheets into one. So with just a couple of clicks you can accept changes and they will be taken over into your master file.”

Layer’s initial sales focus is on the financial reporting function but the co-founders say they see this as a way of getting a toe in the door of their target mid-sized companies.

The team believes there are wider use-cases for the tool, given the ubiquity of spreadsheets as a business tool. Although, for now, their target users are organizations with between 150-250 employees so they’re not (yet) going after the enterprise market.

“We believe this is a pretty big [opportunity],” Schünemann tells TechCrunch. “Why because back in 2018 when we did our first research we initially started out with this one spreadsheet at Helpling but after talking to 50 executives, most of them from the finance world or from the financial function of different sized companies, it’s pretty clear that the spreadsheet dependency is still to this day extremely high. And that holds true for financial use cases — 87% of all budgeting globally is still done via spreadsheets and not big ERP systems… but it also goes beyond that. If you think about it spreadsheets are really the number one workflow platform still used to this day. It’s probably the most used user interface in any given company of a certain size.”

“Our current users we have, for example, a real estate company whereby the finance function is using Layer but also the project controller and also some parts of the HR team,” he adds. “And this is a similar pattern. You have similarly structured workflows on top of spreadsheets in almost all functions of a company. And the bigger you get, the more of them you have.

“We use the finance function as our wedge into a company — just because it’s where our domain experience lies. You also usually have a couple of selective use cases which tend to have these problems more because of the intersections between other departments… However sharing or collecting data in spreadsheets is used not only in finance functions.”

The 2019 founded startup’s productivity platform remains in private beta for now — and likely the rest of this year — but they’ve just nabbed €5 million (~$5.6M) in seed funding to get the product to market, with a launch pegged for Q1 2021.

The seed round is led by Index Ventures (Max Rimpel is lead there), and with participation from earlier backers btov Partners. Angel investors also joining the seed include Ajay Vashee (CFO at Dropbox); Carlos Gonzales-Cadenaz (COO of GoCardless), Felix Jahn (founder and CEO of McMakler), Matt Robinson (founder of GoCardless and Nested) and Max Tayenthal (co-founder and CFO of N26).

Commenting in a statement, Index’s Rimpel emphasized the utility the tool offers for “large distributed organizations”, saying: “Spreadsheets are one of the most successful UI’s ever created, but they’ve been built primarily for a single user, not for large distributed organisations with many teams and departments inputting data to a single document. Just as GitHub has helped developers contribute seamlessly to a single code base, Layer is now bringing sophisticated collaboration tools to the one billion spreadsheet users across the globe.”

On the competition front, Layer said it sees its product as complementary to tech giants Google and Microsoft, given the platform plugs directly into those spreadsheet standards. Whereas other productivity startups, such as the likes of Airtable (a database tool for non-coders) and Smartsheets (which bills itself as a “collaboration platform”) are taking a more direct swing at the giants by gunning to assimilate the spreadsheet function itself, at least for certain use cases.

“We never want to be a new Excel and we’re also not aiming to be a new Google Sheets,” says Schünemann, discussing the differences between Layer and Airtable et al. “What Github is to code we want to be to spreadsheets.”

Given it’s working with the prevailing spreadsheet standard it’s a productivity play which, should it prove successful, could see tech giants copying or cloning some of its features. Given enough scale, the startup could even end up as an acquisition target for a larger productivity focused giant wanting to enhance its own product offering. Though the team claims not to have entertained anything but the most passing thoughts of such an exit at this early stage of their business building journey.

“Right now we are really complementary to both big platforms [Google and Microsoft],” says Schünemann. “However it would be naive for us to think that one or the other feature that we build won’t make it onto the product roadmap of either Microsoft or Google. However our value proposition goes beyond just a single feature. So we really view ourselves as being complementary now and also in the future. Because we don’t push out Excel or Google Sheets from an organization. We augment both.”

“Our biggest competitor right now is probably the ‘we’ve always done it like that’ attitude in companies,” he adds, rolling out the standard early stage startup response when asked to name major obstacles. “Because any company has hacked their processes and tools to make it work for them. Some have built little macros. Some are using Jira or Atlassian tools for their project management. Some have hired people to manage their spreadsheet ensembles for them.”

On the acquisition point, Schünemann also has this to say: “A pre-requisite for any successful exit is building a successful company beforehand and I think we believe we are in a space where there are a couple of interesting exit routes to be taken. And Microsoft and Google are obviously candidates where there would be a very obvious fit but the list goes beyond that — all the file hosting tools like Dropbox or the big CRM tools, Salesforce, could also be interesting for them because it very much integrates into the heart of any organization… But we haven’t gone beyond that simple high level thought of who could acquire us at some point.” 

The speculation that Alibaba’s fintech affiliate Ant Group will go public has been swirling around for years. New details came to light recently. Reuters reported last week that the fintech giant could float as soon as this year in an initial public offering that values it at $200 billion. As a private firm, details of the payments and financial services firm remain sparse, but a new filing by Alibaba, which holds a 33% stake in Ant, provides a rare glimpse into its performance.

Alipay, the brand of Ant’s consumer finance app, claims to earmark 1.3 billion annual active users as of March. The majority of its users came from China, while the rest were brought by its nine e-wallet partners in India, Thailand, South Korea, the Philippines, Bangladesh, Hong Kong, Malaysia, Indonesia, and Pakistan.

In recent years Ant has been striving to scale back its reliance on in-house financial products in response to Beijing’s tightening grip on China’s fledgling fintech industry. Tencent, Alibaba’s nemesis, is considered a lot more reserved in the financial space but its WeChat Pay app has been slowly eating away at Alipay’s share of the payments market.

In a symbolic move in May, the Alibaba affiliate changed its name from Ant Financial to Ant Group. Even prior to that, Ant had been actively publicizing itself as a “technology” company that offers payments gateways and sells digital infrastructure to banks, insurance groups, and other traditional financial institutions — rather than being a direct competitor to them. On the Alipay app, users can browse and access a raft of third-party financial services including wealth management, microloans, and insurance.

As of March, Ant’s wealth management unit facilitated 4 trillion yuan ($570 billion) of assets under management for its partners offering money market funds, fixed income products, and equity investment services. During the same period, total insurance premiums facilitated by Ant more than doubled from the year before.

In June, Ant’s new boss Hu Xiaoming set the goal for the firm to generate 80% of total revenues from technology service fees, up from about 50% in 2019. He anticipated the monetary contribution of Ant’s own proprietary financial services to shrink as a result.

Ant grew out of Alipay, the payments service launched by Alibaba as an escrow service to ensure trust between e-commerce buyers and sellers. In 2011, Alibaba spun off Ant, allegedly to comply with local regulations governing third-party payments services. Ant has since taken on several rounds of equity financing. Today, Alibaba founder Jack Ma still controls a majority of Ant’s voting interests.

The e-reader category was exciting once — or at least as exciting as one could hope from such a space. It was a vibrant category, with plenty of key players, each looking to outdo one another. But as is the case with a depressing number of verticals, Amazon has largely wiped the floor with the competition.

Through all of this, however, Kobo has managed to remain a constant — thanks in no small part to its acquisition by Japanese retail giant Rakuten back in 2012. The company manages to maintain solid market share in a number of countries, including Canada, France, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. It has managed to maintain this presence, in part, due to so solid innovations on the tech side that have helped keep Amazon on its toes.

The Nia, however, is not that. It’s honestly a fairly uninspired addition primarily designed to take the place of the standard Aura, which has been made unavailable for sale on Kobo’s site for some time now. The biggest update here is a bit of a redesign to the hardware that’s…fine. The big blue power button from the back of the Aura has been swapped out for a small and subtler black model on the bottom of the device.

The screen is the industry-standard six-inch Carta from Ink. It’s still 212ppi, though the overall resolution has apparently been downgraded ever so slightly from 1024 x 768 to 1024 x 758. That’s a bit of a weird one. It’s a little bit lighter, a touch less wider and skinnier and a bit longer. All fairly minor there.

There’s a nice little bump in the storage, from 4GB to 8GB, the latter listed as being able to hold up to 6,000 books. The front-lit Comfortline is still on board — nothing quite like the adjustable color temperature that Amazon introduced on its high-end Kindle relatively recently.

There are a number of different SleepCovers — always recommended for those who like to toss their readers in their backpacks, as E Ink screens scratch pretty easily. Most importantly, the price is the same as the Aura at $100. That’s $10 more than the standard Kindle with special offers and $10 cheaper than the version without.

The new reader’s not really much of an upgrade at all over its predecessor, but Kobo remains a solid Kindle alternative — especially due to the platform’s openness for non-proprietary file formats, including the popular ePub. Pre-orders start today. It starts shipping July 21.

Adam Neumann, the controversial co-founder and former CEO of WeWork, has taken a 33% equity stake in GoTo Global, a shared mobility company that operates in Israel and Malta and aims to expand into Europe later this year.

Neumann’s family office, 166 2nd Financial Services, invested $10 million into GoTo Global, as part of a $19 million Series B round. As part of his investment, Neumann will be able to appoint one board member on his behalf. Existing shareholder Shagrir Group Vehicle Services, a publicly traded Israeli company, also participated in the round.

GoTo Global (also referred to is GoTo Mobility) is mobility-as-a-service company that is aiming to cover the entire range of shared vehicles from cars and mopeds to bicycles and electric scooters. The company, which started in 2008 with a focus on car-sharing, previously raised $3 million in seed funding. It had also secured a $9 million loan from Shagrir, which has been converted into the equity investment.

This latest funding will be used to expand its shared services into Europe, beginning with Madrid.

Since forming 166 2nd Financial Services, Neumann has made about 15 investments in startups in Canada, Israel, UK and the United States, including EquityBee, Moon Active and Peach Street.

However, this is Neumann’s first investment since he filed a lawsuit against Softbank Group for alleged breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty for pulling a $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares. SoftBank Group pulled its $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares April 1, citing COVID-19’s impact on the business but also closing conditions not being met.

COVID-19, or more specifically changing consumer behaviors due to the pandemic, is largely what has driven Neumann’s investment in GoTo Global, according to a source familiar with the investment. Neumann isn’t speaking publicly due the lawsuit.

Neumann made the investment because he believes flexibility will be a key component in people’s lives post-COVID-19, the source said.

GoTo Global is just as bullish on its post-COVID future.

“Shared mobility, and transportation in general, was one of industries hit hard by the economy lock-downs as people were required to self-isolate,” GoTo Global CEO Gil Laser said in a statement announcing the raise. “But we are the ones who made the come-back fastest, we are +12% back to pre-lockdown baseline. We understand that although on one hand shared transport may not seem to be the safest solution, on the other hand it is perceived as a safer option than a public transport and it is definitely a much cheaper option than an owned car.”

Adam Neumann, the controversial co-founder and former CEO of WeWork, has taken a 33% equity stake in GoTo Global, a shared mobility company that operates in Israel and Malta and aims to expand into Europe later this year.

Neumann’s family office, 166 2nd Financial Services, invested $10 million into GoTo Global, as part of a $19 million Series B round. As part of his investment, Neumann will be able to appoint one board member on his behalf. Existing shareholder Shagrir Group Vehicle Services, a publicly traded Israeli company, also participated in the round.

GoTo Global (also referred to is GoTo Mobility) is mobility-as-a-service company that is aiming to cover the entire range of shared vehicles from cars and mopeds to bicycles and electric scooters. The company, which started in 2008 with a focus on car-sharing, previously raised $3 million in seed funding. It had also secured a $9 million loan from Shagrir, which has been converted into the equity investment.

This latest funding will be used to expand its shared services into Europe, beginning with Madrid.

Since forming 166 2nd Financial Services, Neumann has made about 15 investments in startups in Canada, Israel, UK and the United States, including EquityBee, Moon Active and Peach Street.

However, this is Neumann’s first investment since he filed a lawsuit against Softbank Group for alleged breach of contract and breach of fiduciary duty for pulling a $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares. SoftBank Group pulled its $3 billion tender offer for WeWork shares April 1, citing COVID-19’s impact on the business but also closing conditions not being met.

COVID-19, or more specifically changing consumer behaviors due to the pandemic, is largely what has driven Neumann’s investment in GoTo Global, according to a source familiar with the investment. Neumann isn’t speaking publicly due the lawsuit.

Neumann made the investment because he believes flexibility will be a key component in people’s lives post-COVID-19, the source said.

GoTo Global is just as bullish on its post-COVID future.

“Shared mobility, and transportation in general, was one of industries hit hard by the economy lock-downs as people were required to self-isolate,” GoTo Global CEO Gil Laser said in a statement announcing the raise. “But we are the ones who made the come-back fastest, we are +12% back to pre-lockdown baseline. We understand that although on one hand shared transport may not seem to be the safest solution, on the other hand it is perceived as a safer option than a public transport and it is definitely a much cheaper option than an owned car.”