Author: azeeadmin

Uber has reportedly made an offer to buy food delivery service Postmates, according to The New York Times.

According to the Times, the talks are still ongoing and the deal could fall through.

For those that have been paying attention to Uber, this appetite is not new, albeit consistent. A little over a month ago, the ride-hailing company was reportedly pursuing an acquisition of Grubhub,  another food delivery company. Grubhub was ultimately acquired by Just Eat Takeaway in a $7.3 billion deal, but only after the deal with Uber fell through over a variety of concerns.

Food delivery market has set to benefit largely from the COVID-19 pandemic, as stores remain shuttered or switch operations to takeout only. Latest earnings from the public ride-hailing company show that its ride-hailing business is slowing while its food delivery service is growing like hell. Gross bookings for Uber Eats last quarter were $4.68 billion.

So even though Uber still loses a ton of money ($2.94 billion including all costs), its Uber Eats growth is staggering. And the green shoots might be fueling some of this interest in other competitors.

If regulatory concerns were an issue, Postmates may make a better fit.

With a valuation of $2.4 billion, Postmates is significantly smaller than Grubhub. And while the company filed to go public nearly 16 months ago, it held off eventually citing “choppy market” conditions.

So if Uber Eats and Postmates combined, the result would still be smaller than Doordash’s market hold, but would be competitive nonetheless. DoorDash, last valued at $13 billion, confidentially filed for an IPO nearly four months ago. 

Also, Postmates delivers more than just food.

If the merger goes through, the food delivery race would get refueled in an interesting way: Uber Eats and Postmates versus Grubhub and Takeaway versus DoorDash .

Postmates declined to comment on rumors or speculation. Uber did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

The United States government began measures today to end its special status with Hong Kong, one month after Secretary of State Michael Pompeo told Congress that Hong Kong should no longer be considered autonomous from China. These include suspending export license exceptions for sensitive U.S. technology and ending the export of defense equipment to Hong Kong. Both the Commerce and State Departments also said further restrictions are being evaluated.

The U.S. government’s announcements were made a few hours before news broke that China had passed a new national security law that will give it greater control over Hong Kong. It is expected to take effect on July 1, according to the South China Morning Post.

The term “special status” refers to arrangements that recognized the difference between Hong Kong and mainland China under the “one country, two systems” policy put into place when the United Kingdom handed control of Hong Kong back to Beijing in 1997. These included different export controls, immigration policies and lower tariffs. But that preferential treatment was put into jeopardy after China proposed the new national security law, which many Hong Kong residents fear will end the region’s judicial independence from Beijing.

The U.S Commerce Department and State Department issued separate statements today detailing the new restrictions on Hong Kong. Secretary of Commerce Wilbur Ross said the Commerce Department will suspend export license exceptions for sensitive U.S. technology, and that “further actions to eliminate differential treatment are also being evaluated.”

The State Department said that it will end exports of U.S. defense equipment and also “take steps toward imposing the same restrictions on U.S. defense and dual-use technologies to Hong Kong as it does for China.”

In a statement to Reuters, Kurt Tong, a former U.S. consul general in Hong Kong, said that the U.S. government’s decisions today would not impact a large amount of trade between the U.S. and Hong Kong because the territory is not a major manufacturing center and its economy is mostly services.

According to figures from the Office of the United States Trade Representative, Hong Kong accounted for 2.2% of overall U.S. exports in 2018, totaling $37.3 billion, with the top export categories being electrical machinery, precious metal and stones, art and antiques, and beef. But the new restrictions could make more difficult for U.S. semiconductor and other technology companies to do business with Hong Kong clients.

Other restrictions proposed by the United States including ending its extradition treaty with Hong Kong.

Both the State and Commerce departments said that the restrictions were put into place for national security reasons. “We can no longer distinguish between the export of controlled items to Hong Kong or to mainland China,” Pompeo wrote. “We cannot risk these items falling into the hands of the People’s Liberation Army, whose primary purpose is to uphold the dictatorship of the CCP by any means necessary.”

In his statement, Ross said, “With the Chinese Communist Party’s imposition of new security measures on Hong Kong, the risk that sensitive U.S. technology will be diverted to the People’s Liberation Army or Ministry of State Security has increased, all while undermining the territory’s autonomy.”

Despite the Wirecard fallout, German fintech startup solarisBank has raised a Series C funding round of $67.5 million (€60 million). Following today’s funding round, solarisBank is now valued at $360 million (€320 million). solarisBank doesn't have any consumer product directly. Instead, it offers financial services to other fintech companies through a set of APIs.

With solarisBank, you can build a fintech startup and leverage solarisBank’s line of products to do the heavy lifting. It’s an infrastructure company in the banking space.

While solarisBank might not be a familiar name, some of its clients have become quite popular. They include challenger banks, such as Tomorrow, Insha and a newcomer called Vivid, business banking startups, such as Penta and Kontist, trading app Trade Republic, cryptocurrency startups Bison and Bitwala, etc.

Overall, solarisBank works with 70 companies that have attracted 400,000 clients in total.

HV Holtzbrinck Ventures is leading the round with existing investor yabeo committing a substantial follow-on investment. Other new investors include Vulcan Capital, Samsung Catalyst Fund and Storm Ventures. Existing investors BBVA, SBI Group, ABN AMRO Ventures, Global Brain, Hegus and Lakestar are investing again.

The company started the fundraising process back in December. Due to the economic prospects, it has been a mixed process. “A lot of investors looked at their portfolio companies and the appetite to look at something new was not there,” solarisBank CEO Roland Folz told me. But everything worked out eventually as around half of the funding comes from existing investors.

“We originally were looking for €40 million but we were overwhelmed by the interest of investors in spite of Covid,” solarisBank Head of Strategy and Shareholder Relations Layla Qassim told me.

solarisBank’s vision could be summed up in two words — regulation and modularity. The company is a fully licensed bank, which means that its clients don’t have to apply to a banking license themselves.

And the startup lets you pick the modules that you want to use for your product. Maybe you’re building a mobile cryptocurrency wallet and you just want to be able to give an IBAN and a debit card to your users. Maybe you’re building a used car marketplace like CarNext and you want to offer credit. Maybe you want to build a challenger bank but address a specific vertical.

With solarisBank, you can open bank accounts and issue payment cards attached to those accounts. You can also issue cards and attach them to a different account in case you’re integrating with existing bank accounts. The startup also offers various services around payments, vouchers, cross-border transactions and more.

More recently, the company launched a new feature called Splitpay with American Express. When customers check out on an e-commerce platform in Germany, American Express customers will be able to choose a repayment plan to pay over multiple months.

solarisBank generates revenue from its clients as they pay to use the company’s APIs and enable accounts and cards. solarisBank also collects the interchange fees on card transactions and share revenue with its clients. Similarly, solarisBank can offer to share revenue on credit interests with its clients.

In the future, solarisBank plans to make its portfolio of financial services even more compelling by introducing local IBANs in the most important European markets. It should make it easier to convince potential clients outside of Germany to use solarisBank as their banking infrastructure.

AWS today announced that CodeGuru, a set of tools that use machine learning to automatically review code for bugs and suggest potential optimizations, is now generally available. The tool launched into preview at AWS re:Invent last December.

CodeGuru consists of two tools, Reviewer and Profiler, and those names pretty much describe exactly what they do. To build Reviewer, the AWS team actually trained its algorithm with the help of code from over 10,000 open source projects on GitHub, as well as reviews from Amazon’s own internal codebase.

“Even for a large organization like Amazon, it’s challenging to have enough experienced developers with enough free time to do code reviews, given the amount of code that gets written every day,” the company notes in today’s announcement. “And even the most experienced reviewers miss problems before they impact customer-facing applications, resulting in bugs and performance issues.”

To use CodeGuru, developers continue to commit their code to their repository of choice, no matter whether that’s GitHub, Bitbucket Cloud, AWS’s own CodeCommit or another service. CodeGuru Reviewer than analyzes that code, tries to find bugs and if it does, it will also offer potential fixes. All of this is done within the context of the code repository, so CodeGuru will create a GitHub pull request, for example, and add a comment to that pull request with some more info about the bug and potential fixes.

To train the machine learning model, users can also provide CodeGuru with some basic feedback, though we’re mostly talking ‘thumbs up’ and ‘thumbs down’ here.

The CodeGuru Application Profiler has a somewhat different mission. It is meant to help developers figure out where there might be some inefficiencies in their code and to identify the most expensive lines of code. This includes support for serverless platforms like AWS Lambda and Fargate.

One feature the team added since it first announced CodeGuru is that Profiler now attaches an estimated dollar amount to the lines of unoptimized code.

“Our customers develop and run a lot of applications that include millions and millions of lines of code. Ensuring the quality and efficiency of that code is incredibly important, as bugs and inefficiencies in even a few lines of code can be very costly. Today, the methods for identifying code quality issues are time-consuming, manual, and error-prone, especially at scale,” said Swami Sivasubramanian, Vice President, Amazon Machine Learning, in today’s announcement. “CodeGuru combines Amazon’s decades of experience developing and deploying applications at scale with considerable machine learning expertise to give customers a service that improves software quality, delights their customers with better application performance, and eliminates their most expensive lines of code.”

AWS says a number of companies started using CodeGuru during the preview period. These include the likes of Atlassian, EagleDream and DevFactory.

“While code reviews from our development team do a great job of preventing bugs from reaching production, it’s not always possible to predict how systems will behave under stress or manage complex data shapes, especially as we have multiple deployments per day,” said Zak Islam, Head of Engineering, Tech Teams, at Atlassian. “When we detect anomalies in production, we have been able to reduce the investigation time from days to hours and sometimes minutes thanks to Amazon CodeGuru’s continuous profiling feature. Our developers now focus more of their energy on delivering differentiated capabilities and less time investigating problems in our production environment.”

Image Credits: AWS

When the going gets tough, it’s common for some corporate VCs to head for the hills.

Today, it’s a narrative that’s emerging again amid the COVID-19 crisis. Global corporate venture deals fell from a total of 580 in April/May of 2019 to 486 in the same period this year, according to Global Corporate Venturing.

However, institutional VC deals are also headed for a decline, with PitchBook anticipating a drop in transaction volume over the next several quarters, as well as a downturn in valuations.

Image Credits: Global Corporate Venturing

It remains to be seen how it will play out this time, but I believe corporate venture capital (CVC) will not only stick around, but also be a vital part of the innovation ecosystem going forward.

I know that Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF) remains fully committed to “doing” venture. Now, more than ever, health innovation is vital. Second, we understand that many of today’s most successful companies were funded in times of uncertainty. In fact, to put our money where our mouth is, we’ve recently completed two spinouts, three follow-on investments, and two new deals in 2020 — all since COVID hit. We intend to increase that pace going forward in 2020 and beyond.

It hasn’t been easy. It’s hard to do venture when you can’t venture out into the world, meet founders and do diligence the way we did in the past. But it is possible, if you do some innovating of your own and set up a smoothly functioning system to do CVC virtually.

Here’s how we’ve done it.

Finding real benefits in virtual CVC

The next iteration of fintech is upon us, according to Inspired Capital’s Alexandra von Tobel.

“Fintech 1.0 was very much, ‘Let’s take what already exists and let’s do it better,’” she said in a recent appearance on Extra Crunch Live. Consumers are shifting away from Chase Bank and migrating to no-fee trading platforms like Robinhood; instead of booking an appointment with a tax advisor, people are registering with TurboTax.

Von Tobel, who founded financial-planning service LearnVest before joining Inspired Capital, said fintech’s future involves bringing infrastructure and support into ecosystems created by services like Robinhood and Betterment. It’s one of the many sectors that her generalist firm, which closed a $200 million debut fund last year, is interested in.

Our hour-long chat included tips on how (and when) to pitch her, breaking into VC and using vulnerability as a competitive advantage. Don’t just take it from us: Watch or listen to the entire conversation after the jump, or read some of the highlights below.

YouTube just took action against a collection of controversial figures synonymous with race-based hate, kicking six major channels off its platform for violating its rules.

The company deleted six channels on Monday: white supremacist outlet American Renaissance and an affiliated channel AmRenPodcasts, Richard Spencer’s own channel and the affiliated channel for the National Policy Institute/Radix Journal, far right figure Stefan Molyneux and white supremacist and longtime Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke.

“We have strict policies prohibiting hate speech on YouTube, and terminate any channel that repeatedly or egregiously violates those policies. After updating our guidelines to better address supremacist content, we saw a 5x spike in video removals and have terminated over 25,000 channels for violating our hate speech policies,” a YouTube spokesperson said in a statement provided to TechCrunch.

The company says that the channels it removed were repeat or “egregious” violators of the platform’s rules against leveraging YouTube videos to link to off-platform hate content and rules prohibiting users from making claims of inferiority about a protected group.

YouTube’s latest house-cleaning of far-right and white nationalist figures follows the suspension of Proud Boys founder Gavin McInnes earlier this month. Some of the newly-booted YouTube account owners turned to still-active Twitter accounts to complain about losing their YouTube channels Monday afternoon.

The same day that YouTube enforced its rules against a high-profile set of far-right accounts, both Twitch and Reddit took their own actions against content that violated their respective rules around hate. The Amazon-owned gaming streaming service suspended President Trump’s account Monday, citing comments made in two Trump rallies that aired there, one years-old and one from the campaign’s recent Tulsa rally. And after years of criticism for its failure to stem harassment and racism on, Reddit announced that it would purge 2,000 subreddits, including r/The_Donald, the infamously hate-filled forum founded as Trump announced his candidacy.

Lululemon today announced plans to acquire home exercise startup Mirror, for $500 million. The fitness apparel company noted its plans by way of a press release, noting that it hopes to close the sale by the end of the second fiscal quarter of this year.

The deal comes at a time when home workout solutions are in high demand. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely limited workout options for many across the world, and the continued closure of gyms have prolonged the problem. Even when they begin to reopen in different locales, it seems many will be wary of returning to a potentially high risk enclosed space, sohttps://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/fitness-startup-mirror-nears-300m-valuation/ long as the virus continues to spread.

“In 2019, we detailed our vision to be the experiential brand that ignites a community of people living the sweatlife through sweat, grow and connect,” CEO Calvin McDonald said in a press release tied to the news. “The acquisition of MIRROR is an exciting opportunity to build upon that vision, enhance our digital and interactive capabilities, and deepen our roots in the sweatlife. We look forward to learning from and working with Brynn Putnam and the team at Mirror to accelerate the growth of personalized in-home fitness.”

The two companies have a relationship dating back to late last year, when Lululemon become an investor in Mirror. The $34 million Series B-1 brought in $34 million for the New York startup’s $1,495 reflective guided workout machine, valuing the startup at around $300 million. The company has raised a total of $74.8 million, from investors including Spark Capital, First Round Capital, Lerer Hippeau and BoxGroup. 

Mirror has been viewed by many as an alternative to Peloton’s wildly popular connect machines. There’s stiff competition in the category of wall-mounted fitness machines, including Tonal and Tempo, but Mirror continues to the biggest name of the bunch. The company came out of stealth on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018.

Lululemon today announced plans to acquire home exercise startup Mirror, for $500 million. The fitness apparel company noted its plans by way of a press release, noting that it hopes to close the sale by the end of the second fiscal quarter of this year.

The deal comes at a time when home workout solutions are in high demand. The COVID-19 pandemic has severely limited workout options for many across the world, and the continued closure of gyms have prolonged the problem. Even when they begin to reopen in different locales, it seems many will be wary of returning to a potentially high risk enclosed space, sohttps://techcrunch.com/2019/06/03/fitness-startup-mirror-nears-300m-valuation/ long as the virus continues to spread.

“In 2019, we detailed our vision to be the experiential brand that ignites a community of people living the sweatlife through sweat, grow and connect,” CEO Calvin McDonald said in a press release tied to the news. “The acquisition of MIRROR is an exciting opportunity to build upon that vision, enhance our digital and interactive capabilities, and deepen our roots in the sweatlife. We look forward to learning from and working with Brynn Putnam and the team at Mirror to accelerate the growth of personalized in-home fitness.”

The two companies have a relationship dating back to late last year, when Lululemon become an investor in Mirror. The $34 million Series B-1 brought in $34 million for the New York startup’s $1,495 reflective guided workout machine, valuing the startup at around $300 million. The company has raised a total of $74.8 million, from investors including Spark Capital, First Round Capital, Lerer Hippeau and BoxGroup. 

Mirror has been viewed by many as an alternative to Peloton’s wildly popular connect machines. There’s stiff competition in the category of wall-mounted fitness machines, including Tonal and Tempo, but Mirror continues to the biggest name of the bunch. The company came out of stealth on stage at TechCrunch Disrupt in 2018.