Author: azeeadmin

European startup studio eFounders has looked back at the first half of 2020 to share some metrics about its portfolio companies. The startup studio that is focused on building software-as-a-service enterprise startups has now launched 25 companies in total. Those startups have raised $148 million in 2020 alone.

You may remember that the portfolio of eFounders reached a total valuation of $1 billion late last year. After those new funding rounds, the consolidated valuation of eFounders companies is now at $1.5 billion.

And because we’re talking about SaaS, the monthly recurring revenue has also doubled year over year compared to the first half of 2019. Overall, those companies now generate around $10 million in monthly recurring revenue.

Of course, some companies are doing better than others. In particular, Front and Aircall have raised $59 million and $65 million respectively. Back when I wrote on those stories, Front said its valuation had quadrupled compared to its previous funding round, while Aircall said it had done more than 3x on the valuation.

Slite, Bonjour, Folk, Cycle and Equify have also raised smaller funding rounds. Yousign, an e-signature startup, has also experienced an important growth bump with demand exploding.

eFounders seems particularly well positioned for the current situation. Due to lockdowns around the world, many companies have been looking at tools that help them work remotely and work more efficiently. “We build the future of work,” eFounders writes on its website.

“The changes that were naturally, but slowly, occurring in companies for a decade have accelerated in a matter of months. We've certainly gained a few years of digitalisation in the space of a quarter,” eFounders co-founder Thibaud Elziere said in a statement.

If you’re not familiar with eFounders, the company first comes up with an idea for a new company and hires a founding team. The core team works alongside the founders for a year or two to define product-market fit — eFounders keeps a stake in those startups.

After that initial launch, portfolio companies usually raise a seed round, which helps them build a solid team. eFounders can switch their focus and start working on new startups.

The robotics category has been building to a kind of critical mass in recent years, but the past six months of the COVID-19 pandemic have pushed many otherwise wary investors over the top. Today, Shenzhen-based Pudu Robotics announced that it has completed a $15 million Series B, with Beijing food services group, Meituan as the sole investor.

Pudu describes itself as a “smart delivery robotics” company, with a majority of its products falling within the food services category. There are multiple robotic SKUs for food delivery and dish return, all of which are indoor models. Rather than focusing on delivery apps, the robotics are designed for a variety of scenarios under the same roof, including hotels, restaurants and office buildings.

Last month, Pudu noted that it has deployed “hundreds” of units to hospitals in South Korea and its native China amid the pandemic. Other existing clients include restaurants and hotels, all of which are looking for methods for reducing human contact as a means of transmitting the novel coronavirus. In total, it says its robots have been deployed in 200 cities across 20 countries.

“Non-human physical contact means safety, and automation means saving human efforts. In the event of human life, these two advantages will be magnified,” CEO Zang Tao said in a press release issued last month. “Many technology companies have played an important role in intelligent disinfection, unmanned delivery and intelligent diagnosis during COVID-19, which made an irreversible influence to the public health system.”

The “irreversible” bit remains to be seen, of course. What does seems certain, however, is that COVID-19 will be in important testing ground for the efficacy and need for these sorts of technologies. What seemed like, at best, an indulgence a year ago is now being viewed as a potentially necessary part of the food handling process. The virus has certainly driven investor interest, but it will be up to the startups to show they’re really to deliver on the promise.

While many investors say sheltering in place has broadened their appetite for funding companies located outside major hubs, one firm is doubling down on backing startups in America’s heartland.

Launched in 2016 by Brett Bohl, The Syndicate Fund rebranded to Bread & Butter Ventures earlier this month (a reference to one of Minnesota’s many nicknames). Along with the rebrand, longtime Google executive and Revolution partner Mary Grove joined the team as a general partner and Stephanie Rich came aboard as head of platform.

The growth of the Twin Cities’ startup ecosystem is precisely why The Syndicate Fund rebranded. The firm, which has $10 million in assets under management, will invest in three of Minneapolis’ biggest strengths: agriculture and food, health care and enterprise software.

Agtech interest spans the entire spectrum from farming to restaurants and grocery stores. The firm is also interested in the “messy middle” of supply chain and logistics around food, said Bohl and is interested in a mix of software, hardware and biosciences. Within health care, the firm evaluates solutions focused on prevention versus treatment, female health startups working on maternal health and fertility and software focused on the aging population and millennials.

It’s also looking at enterprise software that can serve large businesses and scale efficiently.

Contrary Capital, which has raised money from Tesla, Reddit, SoFi and Twitch, knows a thing or two about how to work with tech’s brightest mafias. Now it wants to invest in them, before anyone else.

The San Francisco fund and accelerator, which traditionally invests in student entrepreneurs, is betting on the idea that the best founders are early-career employees first. Today Contrary Capital is publicly launching its next big bet: Contrary Talent, a new arm within the fund that will invest and support early-career folks and students to grow their tech ambitions.

While Contrary Capital founder Eric Tarczynski said the new focus is not a pivot for the firm, he added that he wouldn’t be surprised if early-career professionals become the bulk of the portfolio in years to come.

Contrary Talent will source the top engineers, designers and managers at top tech companies and pair them with top operators in tech for mentorship and job consultancy. It’s giving startup employees access to great minds before they have a pitch deck, or even know how to make one.

Talent members will only be admitted to the group through a referral from one of Contrary Capital’s hundred-plus venture partners, or scouts. The firm’s venture partner network has operated for the past four years to help the firm find talent on college campuses, so now it will shift to also focus on early-career talent.

The goal is to have a diverse end result, so it doesn’t hurt that Contrary Capital’s venture partner network is currently 40% female and 60% non-white.

Contrary Talent is also launching a venture partner team at an undisclosed HBCU this fall to increase representation.

Along with the announcement, Contrary Capital shared it has hired Triplebyte’s former head of talent, Ellis Briery, to lead this new arm of the fund.

Once a candidate is referred, they will have to go through multiple rounds of interviews before being selected to join the Talent community. Members receive access to job opportunities, mentorship, invites to annual retreats and funding when (and if) they do decide to start a company.

The program has been in stealth for six months so far and has 150 members. Contrary Talent will admit roughly 100 new members annually, and there will be continuous light learning on job resources, 1:1 training for career paths and AMAs with top people within tech. Think of the curriculum as a steady, but small, drip of asynchronous and live learning.

Contrary founder Eric Tarczynski said there is reserved capital for Talent members, but did not disclose how much. Contrary has low tens of millions in assets under management.

“Because of the long-term nature of the program and that we want to support Talent members regardless of whether or not they’re starting companies right now, we’ll be investing in Talent member-started companies across many funds,” Tarczynski said. He estimated that about 33% of investments from the current fund will come from the Talent community.

“Candidly, we’re not expecting Facebooks to be kind of falling off of trees,” Tarczynski said.

Talent is Contrary Capital’s first move beyond investing in students since its inception in 2016.

“As time went on and we spent more time on the ground at tech campuses, we realized not only were the number of young founders going up, but so were the number of top engineers, designers and product heads who were interested in working in tech,” he said.

Finding out how many Black founders have successfully raised venture capital, and which venture capital firms invested in their startups hasn’t been an easy task, historically. Venture capital data is often diceable by stage, say, or by startup type. But if you wanted to know how many Black founders a particular firm had invested into, that information has been hard to come by.

Until now, that is.

Earlier this year, a group called People of Color in Tech compile what it called “the most comprehensive list of US-based venture-backed Black founders ever.” You can check out the data here. It’s an extraordinary document, both for its usefulness and its brevity. This morning the list is just 283 names long, though it appears to be expanding over time.

The same group recently put together more data. Now, the same public spreadsheet includes details on which venture capital firms have invested in Black-founded startups. (The founder list came during Black History month, while the VC list was put together around Juneteenth, People of Color in Tech wrote; for more on how tech recently discovered Juneteenth, head here).

There are more VC firms that have invested in Black founders than there are Black founders who have raised money from VCs. This makes sense, as there is often more than one VC firm in any given round. But while the number of VCs detailed is encouraging at first glance, there’s nuance to the data.

TechCrunch spoke with James Norman, CEO of Pilot.ly, a partner at the Transparent Collective and a contributor to the dataset, who told TechCrunch that he was initially “overwhelmed by the sheer number of investments made from 570 different firms,” but that “after one look, roughly 75% of the names had one black founder investment.”

Even more, Norman told TechCrunch that after reviewing the data he “realized most of the firms on this list are likely follow-ons piling into single rounds of funding.” That most VC firms on the list of groups that put capital into a single Black-founded startup “highlights the lack of capital deployed to black founded startups in general” he continued.

Still, having the founder and VC data compiled is useful on its own. In Norman’s view, the dataset will allow other orgs to ingest and parse the data, hopefully yielding useful knowledge that was previously occluded.

Sefanit Tades, another contributor to the Black founder and VC lists, told TechCrunch that response to the databases has been “overwhelmingly positive, with a number of people reaching out to provide support to expand the list and provide additional data points.” She also said that user “feedback is also driving our iterations on The Black Founder List database,” so there should be more to come from the effort. That’s exciting and welcome.

Silicon Valley loves to say things like “measure what matters.” Well, here’s a list of Black founders and the VCs who have cut one, two, or more checks into their startups. It matters that both lists get longer, and we can now measure progress.

LogBox, a South African medical data startup that bills itself as an “absolutely secure” way of replacing paper forms for sharing patient data with doctors, has exposed user accounts and patient data following a security lapse.

Security researcher Anurag Sen found an exposed database belonging to the company containing account access tokens for thousands of LogBox users, which if used would grant full access to users’ accounts without requiring their password, Sen said.

Sen reported the exposed database to the company but did not hear back. After TechCrunch reached out, the database was pulled offline.

When reached, LogBox director Neal Goldstein declined to comment by our deadline or answer any of our questions, specifically if LogBox planned to inform users or customers that data was exposed or if the company plans to report the incident to regulators.

Founded in 2010, LogBox has become a rising star in South Africa, just last year partnering with Lancet Laboratories, a medical diagnostics company that operates in 11 African countries.

South Africa is one of Africa’s top tech hubs, attracting $206 million in VC in 2019, according to Partech.

Healthtech ventures have been on the rise across Africa, with medical related startups accounting for a third of all investment deals on the continent in 2019, per WeeTracker’s last annual investment report.

LogBox’s database exposure comes as South Africa’s new data privacy laws — advanced by the country’s president Cyril Ramaphosa — take effect on July 1.

South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) seeks to better safeguard personal data and protect against data breaches, per a statement of the country’s president.

The measure includes guidelines that apply to LogBox’s business activities and database exposure.

When the inventor of AWS Lambda, Tim Wagner, and the former head of blockchain at AWS, Shruthi Rao, co-found a startup, it’s probably worth paying attention. Vendia, as the new venture is called, combines the best of serverless and blockchain to help build a truly multi-cloud serverless platform for better data and code sharing.

Today, the Vendia team announced that it has raised a $5.1 million seed funding round, led by Neotribe’s Swaroop ‘Kittu’ Kolluri. Correlation Ventures, WestWave Capital, HWVP, Firebolt Ventures, Floodgate and Future\Perfect Ventures also participated in this oversubscribed round.

(Image Credits: Vendia)

Seeing Wagner at the helm of a blockchain-centric startup isn’t exactly a surprise. After building Lambda at AWS, he spent some time as VP of engineering at Coinbase, where he left about a year ago to build Vendia.

“One day, Coinbase approached me and said, ‘hey, maybe we could do for the financial system what you’ve been doing over there for the cloud system,’ ” he told me. “And so I got interested in that. We had some conversations. I ended up going to Coinbase and spent a little over a year there as the VP of Engineering, helping them to set the stage for some of that platform work and tripling the size of the team.” He noted that Coinbase may be one of the few companies where distributed ledgers are actually mission-critical to their business, yet even Coinbase had a hard time scaling its Ethereum fleet, for example, and there was no cloud-based service available to help it do so.

Tim Wagner, Vendia co-founder and CEO (Image Credits: Vendia)

“The thing that came to me as I was working there was why don’t we bring these two things together? Nobody’s thinking about how would you build a distributed ledger or blockchain as if it were a cloud service, with all the things that we’ve learned over the course of the last 10 years building out the public cloud and learning how to do it at scale,” he said.

Wagner then joined forces with Rao, who spent a lot of time in her role at AWS talking to blockchain customers. One thing she noticed was that while it makes a lot of sense to use blockchain to establish trust in a public setting, that’s really not an issue for enterprise.

“After the 500th customers, it started to make sense,” she said. “These customers had made quite a bit of investment in IoT and edge devices. And they were gathering massive amounts of data. And they also made investments on the other side, with AI and ML and analytics. And they said, ‘well, there’s a lot of data and I want to push all of this data through these intelligent systems. And I need a mechanism to get this data.’ ” But the majority of that data often comes from third-party services. At the same time, most blockchain proof of concepts weren’t moving into any real production usage because the process was often far too complex, especially enterprises that maybe wanted to connect their systems to those of their partners.

Shruthi Rao, Vendia co-founder and CBO (Image Credits: Vendia)

“We are asking these partners to spin up Kubernetes clusters and install blockchain nodes. Why is that? That’s because for blockchain to bring trust into a system to ensure trust, you have to own your own data. And to own your own data, you need your own node. So we’re solving fundamentally the wrong problem,” she explained.

The first product Vendia is bringing to market is Vendia Share, a way for businesses to share data with partners (and across clouds) in real time, all without giving up control over that data. As Wagner noted, businesses often want to share large data sets but they also want to ensure they can control who has access to that data. For those users, Vendia is essentially a virtual data lake with provenance tracking and tamper-proofing built-in.

The company, which mostly raised this round after the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S., is already working with a couple of design partners in multiple industries to test out its ideas, and plans to use the new funding to expand its engineering team to build out its tools.

“At Neotribe Ventures, we invest in breakthrough technologies that stretch the imagination and partner with companies that have category creation potential built upon a deep-tech platform,” said Neotribe founder and managing director Kolluri. “When we heard the Vendia story, it was a no-brainer for us. The size of the market for multi-party, multi-cloud data and code aggregation is enormous and only grows larger as companies capture every last bit of data. Vendia’s Serverless -based technology offers benefits such as ease of experimentation, no operational heavy lifting and a pay-as-you-go pricing model, making it both very consumable and highly disruptive. Given both Tim and Shruthi’s backgrounds, we know we’ve found an ideal ‘Founder fit’ to solve this problem! We are very excited to be the lead investors and be a part of their journey.”

In 10 years, Tesla has gone from public market newbie to the most valuable automaker in the world by market value. The electric automaker had long since passed the valuations of Ford and GM and in January became the most valuable U.S. automaker ever when its market cap hit $81.39 billion.

Still, a few automakers remained ahead of Tesla. Until today. Tesla shares popped Wednesday after the market opened, rising nearly 4% to $1,129.18 — hitting a new 52-week high. The company’s market capitalization now stands at nearly $208 billion, surpassing Toyota to become the world most valuable automaker by market value. Toyota’s market cap is $203.21 billion.

The automaker’s stock price has confounded some analysts as it continued to rise and fall and then rise, rise, rise again despite a series of controversies and set backs. Tesla’s new status as most valuable automaker in the world doesn’t match up with its global volume, but that hasn’t dampened investor spirits. Tesla has certainly accelerated production and deliveries. Tesla delivered 367,500 electric vehicles in 2019 — 50% more than the previous year — a record-breaking figure largely supported by sales of the cheaper Model 3.

Toyota produces 10 million vehicles annually.

Tesla has escaped the rules that investors have applied to traditional automakers. The company is viewed more as a tech company than an automaker. Analysts’ forecasts often focus as much on CEO Elon Musk’s promises on future products that might never materialize as they do on the more pedestrian quarterly figures such as delivery and production numbers and revenue.

Tesla’s share price also appears immune to the effects that the COVID-19 pandemic has had on the rest of the automotive industry. While even Tesla has experienced COVID-19 related slowdowns as well as temporary suspension of production, investors have continued to buy in and push the share price higher.

Tesla’s share price could rise again if its second-quarter delivery and production figures, which should be reported today or Thursday, meet or surpass analysts expectations. Analysts polled by FactSet expect sales of 72,000 vehicles in the second quarter.

How many government demands for user data has Zoom received? We won’t know until “later this year,” an updated Zoom blog post now says.

The video conferencing giant previously said it would release the number of government demands it has received by June 30. But the company said it’s missed that target and has given no firm new date for releasing the figures.

It comes amid heightened scrutiny of the service after a number of security issues and privacy concerns came to light following a massive spike in its user base, thanks to millions working from home because of the coronavirus pandemic.

In a blog post today reflecting on the company’s turnaround efforts, chief executive Eric Yuan said the company has made “made significant progress defining the framework and approach for a transparency report that details information related to requests Zoom receives for data, records, or content.”

“We look forward to providing the fiscal [second quarter data in our first report later this year,” he said.

Transparency reports offer rare insights into the number of demands or requests a company gets from the government for user data. These reports are not mandatory, but are important to understand the scale and scope of government surveillance.

Zoom said last month it would launch its first transparency report after the company admitted it briefly suspended the Zoom accounts of two U.S.-base accounts and one Hong Kong activist at the request of the Chinese government. The users, who were not based in China, held a Zoom call commemorating the anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre, an event that’s cloaked in secrecy and censorship in mainland China.

The company said at the time it “must comply with applicable laws in the jurisdictions where we operate,” but later said that it would change its policies to disallow requests from the Chinese government to impact users outside of mainland China.

A spokesperson for Zoom did not immediately comment.

Kevin Mayer, the chief executive of TikTok said on Wednesday that the popular short-form video app complies with “all data privacy and security requirements under Indian law,” two days after New Delhi banned 59 apps including Mayer’s citing security concerns.

Addressing TikTok’s 2000 employees in India on Wednesday, Mayer said ByteDance, the parent firm of the Chinese app, would do “everything in our power to restore the positive experiences and opportunities that they can be proud of.”

With more than 200 million of its users in India, TikTok counts Asia’s third-largest economy as its biggest overseas market.

New Delhi announced late Monday that it was blocking 59 apps that have been developed by Chinese firms. Among the apps that have been blocked include Tencent’s WeChat, and Alibaba Group’s UC Browser and UC News. An Alibaba Group spokesperson in India did not respond to a request for comment.

The Indian government alleged that these apps were “compiling, mining and profiling” users’ data that posed threats to “national security and defence of India.”

In his address today, which TikTok later published on its blog, Mayer said that his firm “places highest importance on user privacy and integrity.” TikTok was working with various stakeholders in India to address their concerns, he said.

Mayer’s address to his employees comes a day after TikTok pulled its app from Google Play Store and Apple’s App Store in India and revoked existing users in the world’s second largest internet market from accessing its service. Visiting TikTok app or mobile website in India currently returns an error that states TikTok is in the process of complying with New Delhi’s order.

“Today, it is a staple and reality for TikTok users even in remote cities, towns and villages across the country. Empowered individual creators have become the most sought-after for digital marketing campaigns. Small and medium enterprises and entrepreneurs have been able to realise their growth ambitions and dreams by reaching out to thousands of potential customers and consumers on a daily basis, through the platform,” said Mayer.

It remains unclear at this point when — and if — India would reverse its ban on TikTok and other apps. TikTok, the most popular app among the 59 apps blocked by India, has been particularly hit by New Delhi’s order.

Google and Apple said Tuesday that the Indian government had asked them to only pull the TikTok app from their stores and that TikTok had voluntarily delisted its app from the nation.

Other apps remain available on Google Play Store and App Store at the time of writing. Though India’s Department of Telecommunications has since ordered Vodafone, Airtel, and Reliance Jio to block access to all the banned apps on their networks with “immediate effect.”

TikTok has been facing backlash in India for several weeks as an anti-China sentiment gains pace in the nation. A skirmish between the two neighboring nations at a disputed Himalayan border site that left 20 Indian soldiers dead last month further escalated that tension.

In May, several users unearthed and shared numerous recent TikTok videos on Twitter that appeared to promote domestic violence, animal cruelty, racism, child abuse and objectification of women. This prompted many in India to leave a poor rating of the TikTok app in the Google Play Store to express their disgust.

“Our partnership efforts with credible national and global organisations such as UN Women, United Nations Development Programme, UNICEF, and CRY have raised awareness and advocated for concerted action to end gender-based, domestic violence and child marriage,” Mayer said today.