Author: azeeadmin

Pipo Saude, a startup that developed a platform that sells and manages healthcare benefits for Brazilian companies, has raised $20 million in a Series A round of funding.

Joshua Kushner’s Thrive Capital led the round, marking the first time the New York-based venture firm has led an investment in a Brazilian startup. (Although, notably, Thrive has also put money in Nubank and Loft.)

Atlantico participated in the financing as a new investor in addition to all existing backers including Monashees, Kaszek and OneVC. Nubank co-founder and CEO David Velez and Cedar co-founder and CEO Florian Otto (and former CEO of Groupon in Brazil) also joined in the round. Pipo Saude had raised $4.6 million in a seed round in June 2020 that was led by Monashees and Kaszek with the participation of OneVC and Nubank’s Velez.

Manoela Mitchell (CEO), Thiago Torres (COO) and Vinicius Correa (CTO) founded Pipo Saude in July 2019 with the goal of “bringing an unparalleled experience” of buying and managing healthcare benefits for corporations in combination with providing a care navigation platform for employees. More simply, its mission is to “transform” the healthcare experience for companies and their employees.

Pipo Saude started selling its solution six months after its inception. Over the past year, it has grown its ARR by “around 5x,” and the number of lives managed by 7.2x, according to Mitchell. Pipo currently has 100 corporate clients and 15,000 lives under management. Its clients include Brazilian unicorns MadeiraMadeira and Buser, Caelum and Funcional Health Tech, among others. Pipo Saude makes money off of commissions and says that its business model is a hybrid of Nava, Accolade and Rightway, but that Zenefits and Amino are inspirations or benchmarks that it “looks up to.”

When Pipo was first founded in 2019, the company was trying to convince prospective customers that digital healthcare could be an interesting option to reduce cost and improve care, according to Mitchell.

And then when the COVID-19 pandemic hit in March 2020, she added, the whole sector was forced to change and the company saw all stakeholders from doctors to employers to patients “adopting technologies to make their job easier or more accessible to others.”

This trend also helped Pipo grow. In January 2020, it had two corporate clients. By December of the same year, it had around 70.

“COVID has fast-forwarded the digital transformation of the healthcare system everywhere, but even more so in a place like Brazil that was a few years behind the U.S. when it came to technology penetration in the health space,” Mitchell said.

Because healthcare is so complex, most companies outsource the benefits capabilities to traditional brokers. Pipo, she said, was created to “disrupt this landscape” with the use of technology and data.

The company claims that enrolling a new member in a healthcare plan can typically take up to 10 business days in Brazil, but that Pipo “can do it in less than 1 hour” given its integrations with HMO/PPOs. It plans to use the new funds to continue investing heavily in technology and data with the goal of launching its first digital product that will be “100% focused” on its members.

Sao Paulo-based Pipo currently has 108 employees distributed across 33 cities and three countries, up from 27 a year ago. During the pandemic, it evolved into being a “remote-first-company.”

The startup also plans to use its new capital to do some hiring, with the goal of doubling the number of its full-time employees by year’s end. Mitchell described the business model as an “asset-light” one that connects healthcare buyers, users and products without having any type of regulatory capital need.

In the medium to long term, Mitchell said the team views Pipo as a local business rather than a global one.

“Going deep into healthcare data and protocols requires a lot of specialization and deep understanding,” she said. Also, the opportunity in Brazil is just so large.

“We are focused on being the local leader in Brazil rather than having a broader but shallower expertise across many markets,” Mitchell said.

Kareem Zaki, a general partner at Thrive, said his firm invested in Pipo Saude because it viewed the company as the first of its kind innovating the channel by which healthcare solutions reach individuals and their families.

“Pipo is using data to deliver value at every step of the customer journey, from informing employers’ purchase decisions and automating manual pieces of benefit management to helping employees navigate the healthcare system to meet their individual needs,” he wrote in an email. “The result is 20% better savings, up to 50 times faster workflows, and a 97% customer satisfaction rate that is unprecedented in the industry.”

Pipo Saude is not the only Brazilian startup tackling the benefits space. Earlier this month, Flash, a startup that has developed a flexible benefits platform for Brazilian companies and employees, announced it had raised $22 million in a Series B round of funding led by Tiger Global Management.

Gupshup, a business messaging platform that began its journey in India 15 years ago, surprised many when it raised $100 million in April this year, roughly 10 years after its last financing round, and attained the coveted unicorn status. Now just three months later, the San Francisco-headquartered startup has secured even more capital from high-profile investors.

On Wednesday, Gupshup said it had raised an additional $240 million as part of the same Series F financing round. The new investment was led by Fidelity Management, Tiger Global, Think Investments, Malabar Investments, Harbor Spring Capital, certain accounts managed by Neuberger Berman Investment Advisers, and White Oak.

Neeraj Arora, formerly a high-profile executive at WhatsApp who played an instrumental role in helping the messaging platform sell to Facebook, also wrote a significant check to Gupshup in the new tranche of investment, which continues to value the startup at $1.4 billion as in April.

In an interview with TechCrunch earlier this week, Beerud Sheth, co-founder and chief executive of Gupshup, said he extended the financing round after receiving too many inbound requests from investors. The round is now closed, he said.

The startup, which operates a conversational messaging platform that is used by over 100,000 businesses and developers today to build their own messaging and conversational experiences to serve their users and customers, is beginning to consider exploring the public markets by next year, said Sheth, though he cautioned a final decision is yet to be made.

The new investment, which includes some secondary transactions (some early investors and employees are selling their stakes), will be deployed into broadening the product offerings of Gupshup, he said. The startup is also eyeing some M&A opportunities and may close some deals this year, he added.

Before Gupshup became so popular with businesses, it existed in a different avatar. For the first six years of its existence, Gupshup was best known for enabling users in India to send group messages to friends. (These cheap texts and other clever techniques enabled tens of millions of Indians to stay in touch with one another on phones a decade ago.)

That model eventually became unfeasible to continue, Sheth told TechCrunch in an earlier interview.

“For that service to work, Gupshup was subsidizing the messages. We were paying the cost to the mobile operators. The idea was that once we scale up, we will put advertisements in those messages. Long story short, we thought as the volume of messages increases, operators will lower their prices, but they didn’t. And also the regulator said we can’t put ads in the messages,” he said earlier this year.

That’s when Gupshup decided to pivot. “We were neither able to subsidize the messages, nor monetize our user base. But we had all of this advanced technology for high-performance messaging. So we switched from consumer model to enterprise model. So we started to serve banks, e-commerce firms, and airlines that need to send high-level messages and can afford to pay for it,” said Sheth, who also co-founder freelance workplace Elance in 1998.

Over the years, Gupshup has expanded to newer messaging channels, including conversational bots and it also helps businesses set up and run their WhatsApp channels to engage with customers.

Sheth said scores of major firms worldwide in banking, e-commerce, travel and hospitality and other sectors are among the clients of Gupshup. These firms are using Gupshup to send their customers transaction information and authentication codes, among other use cases. “These are not advertising or promotional messages. These are core service information,” he said.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Something very interesting is going on with supply chains, and has been for a while. But it’s clear the pandemic has accelerated the trend. Tech startups are once again cutting out the middle man, but this time at the supply chain level. The opportunity is to replace supply chains with platforms – it’s the ‘platformization of supply chains’ if you will.

The latest example of this is Colvin, a platform for the ‘floriculture’ industry, which has now raised a €45M Series C led by Eurazeo, a private equity and venture capital firm out of France which has invested other marketplaces such as Farfetch, Glovo or ManoMano. Also participating was Capagro, and AgTech and FoodTech VC also out of France.

Launched as a direct-to-consumer brand (which is still maintained) Colvin has now created a B2B category aimed at professionals.

Sergi Bastardas, cofounder of Colvin said: “2020 has been a year of acceleration for Colvin, a turning point that will set the pace for our growth over the coming years… Our goal at Colvin is to lead the transformation of the industry at a global level”.

Chloé Giard, Investment Director at Eurazeo said: “Colvin’s trajectory in the flower delivery market has been outstanding. They have proved they could grow both fast and profitably, while expanding into new geographies. This is only a first step in their ambition to build the future of the flower industry: as more and more B2B categories are switching online (see the recent announcements of Ankorstore, Choco or Sennder), the timing is unique to bring a new standard to the flower wholesale market. Colvin is leveraging years of industry expertise, a scalable supply chain, and a global network of trusted growers to seize this $ billion market opportunity.”

Over a call, Bastardas told me: “The Netherlands has a monopoly on the flowers and plants market. Some 65% of all flowers and plants in the world have to pass, physically, through a huge auction that sits in the Netherlands, regardless of where they were cultivated. This is because the industry is not digitalized. So that’s the problem we were solving: connecting the stakeholders in a more direct way.”

He said they’d started by connecting growers with customers with a b2c platform: “We’ve now started to build out our b2b solution, where we connect our growers, as well as wholesalers directly with retailers, avoiding unnecessary intermediaries, with technology.”

I asked him if he will annoy the industry: “The intermediaries are going to be mad with us, yes.”

Alex Lim, a British-born VC based in the Bay Area who invested in Hopin, UiPath, Discord, and many other unicorns has decided to up sticks and leave Sand Hill Road behind for Blossom Capital in London. Blossom is fast making a name for itself both in Europe and internationally, having invested in breakout hits like Tines, Duffel, and Checkout.com.

Lim, the youngest-ever Partner promotion at IVP, leaves after six years to take on the role of Managing Partner at Blossom. Blossom founder Ophelia Brown will remain as Co-Managing Partner.

Despite being born in the UK, Lim has spent his entire adult life in the US, so brings an interesting mix of UK/European culture, combined with West Coast savvy.

“Alex is an exceptional investor and adored by anyone he works with,” said Blossom founder Ophelia Brown. “He builds strong personal connections and is relentlessly committed to founders, which makes him a perfect fit for our team at Blossom. He shares our ethos and approach, which is to put founders at the center of everything we do. Alex brings with him both an incredible level of knowledge and expertise in building technology businesses, as well as a strong network in the US, which our companies will benefit from immensely.”

Lim started his career in investment banking at Credit Suisse, and became IVP’s youngest Partner in its 41-year history.

He told me: “I was promoted last October, to partner. I was the youngest partner in the history of the firm. I’ve been making European investments for a couple of years now, and that’s how I met Ophelia.”

He told me that Blossom would be heading more towards Series A investing in the future: “I think it’s the right strategy for Europe. A European Series A fund is like a very attractive market in my perspective, and it’s a little bit underserved by the venture community. There are great companies out there. Opportunity is very fragmented across cities. So I think there’s a lot of opportunity for our style of investing, getting out on the road and meeting entrepreneurs in person.”

He admitted “it’s a big step to take on a new managing partner. So we’re entering a new chapter.”

He added that Europe is now ripe for bigger companies and investors: “There’s been a big change over the last 12 months. Some of the outcomes that you’ve seen over the last few months have been just on a different level to what the European is experience has been before, with huge companies emerging like UIPath and Wise.”

Blossom Capital has also appointed Tatiana Chopova, formerly of McKinsey and Company, Insead and ALPInvest, as Operating Partner, and Kim Goddard as Talent Partner, following his roles in talent acquisition at NuBank, Atlassian and Funding Circle. 

An online marketplace for automobiles has become the latest Indian startup to attain the coveted unicorn status.

Gurgaon-headquartered Droom said on Wednesday it has raised $200 million in what it described as a pre-IPO growth funding round. The new investment valued the seven-year-old startup at $1.2 billion, up from about $500 million in October 2018.

57 Stars, Seven Train Ventures and several existing investors financed the new round, said the startup, which counts Toyota and Lightbox among its early backers and has raised about $342 million to date, according to records on insight platform Tracxn.

Droom operates a marketplace in India to help people buy and sell used multi-category vehicles such as cars and motorbikes. The startup provides verified listings for buyers along with tools to view, schedule, negotiate and communicate with the seller. Sellers are provided with tools to manage their listings and estimate prices and dispute issues.

“Droom’s current annual run-rate is $1.7 billion for GMV and $54 million for net revenue. The company remains on track to touch a GMV of $2 billion and a net Revenue of $65 million in CY2021,” it said in a brief statement.

“With the current scale, technology-oriented business, and operational efficiency Droom is nearing profitability.”

The startup, which competes with other Indian unicorns including Spinny and Cars24, said it is working to file for an IPO and list on either Nasdaq or in India next year.

“Over the past 7 years, we have invested millions of dollars and thousands of human hours to build a full technology-based end-to-end transactional marketplace for buying and selling of automobiles online,” said Sandeep Aggarwal, founder and chief executive of Droom, in a statement.

“We have developed the complete technology-based machinery starting from first-mile services such as OBV, ECO, and History to mid-mile services like loan & insurance and last-mile services like doorstep delivery. Droom has been on a steady growth trajectory after Covid. While automobile is the largest retail category, it is the least penetrated online. In a post-pandemic world, we expect automobile buying and selling to shift online rapidly.”

Droom is the 17th Indian startup to become a unicorn as high-profile investors double down on their bets in the world’s second largest internet market.

There are over 1 billion mobile money accounts globally. Africa leads the way in transaction value and volume thanks to M-Pesa, largely used in East Africa. Other regions across the continent are also growing fast.

In 2019, West Africa reported the most live mobile money services in any region, with 56 million active accounts. In Ivory Coast, one of Francophone Africa’s largest mobile money markets, 75% of the population own a mobile money account, compared to 20% who own bank accounts. The difference is staggering and clearly shows the region’s huge appetite for the service.

While telecom operators have largely dominated mobile money services across most of sub-Saharan Africa, a few startups are trying to change the mobile money experience for customers. Ivory Coast-based fintech startup Julaya is one such company, and today, it announced a $2 million pre-Series A funding to expand its products across West Africa.

Julaya was founded in 2018 by Mathias Léopoldie and Charles Talbot. Before launching Julaya, they worked at French payment fintech LemonWay on their service in Mali and Burkina Faso.

Léopoldie told TechCrunch that the experience introduced them to how mobile money worked across Francophone Africa. LemonWay acts as a payment solution for marketplaces. So, while working on expanding the fintech’s service in both countries, the pair noticed the massive potential businesses had to reach the unbanked via the large consumer penetration of telecom operators.

Julaya was launched to digitize trade payments but started in the Ivory Coast instead of Mali and Burkina Faso. The platform enables companies to streamline their accounting and improve their operational efficiency by digitizing payments to workers and suppliers instead of relying on cash.

The company helps African businesses and institutions disburse payments to mobile money and mobile banking wallets. It achieves this by working with telecom operators and other fintech startups in the region.

“Mobile money is coming to a mature stage where business and public institution use-cases provide new growth opportunities for the sector. The pandemic has opened up minds about the urge to digitize payments. Fintech competition in West Africa is making digital finance more affordable for consumers, and technical integrations with telecom operators are becoming more reliable,” Talbot said in a statement. 

Yet, these partnerships haven’t come without their own share of challenges. For one, payments technology in Francophone Africa remains quite fragmented, and APIs from telecoms are still burgeoning and somewhat unreliable.

Léopoldie added that challenges come from distribution channels, making it difficult for the company to sell en masse at a cheap cost, as well as from the untrustworthiness of businesses toward digitized payments.  

“In Ivory Coast, a wire transfer takes between one to three days, and you always have to check with your bank branch as a customer. … Businesses do not trust digital experiences as they often have shortcomings, and educating the market bears a high cost on acquisition. Then, talents that have a startup mindset are still difficult to find,” Léopoldie said of some of the challenges facing the three-year-old startup.

Despite this, the startup, which has an R&D and technical team in France, has bagged customers from SMBs and large corporates to government institutions. The company says it’s currently processing over $1.5 million monthly for 50 of these customers, including Jumia, SODECI, Ministry of Education, Ivory Coast and the World Bank.

Julaya closed a pre-seed investment of $250,000 in 2018 and a seed investment of $550,000 a year later, all from angel investors. But the company has introduced VC firms in its pre-Series A round. They include corporate venture capital firms Orange Ventures and MFS Africa Frontiers; VC firms Saviu Ventures, Launch Africa and 50 Partners Capital; and some angel investors in Africa and Europe. Julaya will use the investment to broaden its market share in Ivory Coast and launch digital payment products and expand across West Africa.  

More than 20 million people use Orange as a mobile money service across 15 African countries. The telecom operator also recently launched a mobile banking platform in Ivory Coast and has surpassed 500,000 users. Thus, what’s the rationale behind this strategic investment, which marks its third check in an African fintech startup after South Africa’s Yoco and Senegal’s SudPay?

“Fintech’s environment in Africa is distinguished by its competitiveness and strong dynamism. Orange Group, through its technology investment fund, intends to participate in this boom by supporting fintechs such as Julaya. The goal is to target local technology champions at the service of the transition to a more digital and responsible world,” said Habib Bamba, the director of Transformation, digital and media at Orange Ivory Coast.

Orange, other telecom operators, fintechs and banks remain big competitors to Julaya. So how does it plan to stay on top of people’s minds across the region? Léopoldie thinks that focusing on the best user experience might do the trick.

“This sounds like an overheard statement, but we understand that what the customer values most is reliable customer support and a predictable and smooth online experience, for instance, a reliable platform with very little downtime,” he said. “Even if you only have a 90% success rate on your transactions, as long as you give this information in a transparent communication to the customer, they will trust you.”

In Bangladesh, students often rely on after school learning centers for study help or test preparation, but many of the best ones are concentrated in major cities. Edtech startup Shikho was created to make supplementary education more accessible and affordable. The company announced today it has closed a $1.3 million seed round co-led by returning investor LearnStart (the seed fund of edtech investment firm Learn Capital) and Anchorless Bangladesh. 

The round also included participation from Wavemaker Partners and Ankur Nagpal, founder and chief executive officer of online course platform Teachable. Shikho’s last round of funding was $275,000 in pre-seed financing last year from LearnStart and strategic angel investors. 

Founded in April 2019, Shikho is focused on grades 9, 10, 11 and 12, with plans to introduce content for grades 6 up to university level and continuous education. Its learning material, created by educators and subject experts, is based on the Bangladeshi National Curriculum. To keep students engaged, it uses gamification techniques, like points, leaderboards and virtual awards. 

Shikho was founded in April 2019 by CEO Shahir Chowdhury, who previously worked in finance and business, including as a director at HSBC UK’s Private Bank, and chief operating officer Zeeshan Zakaria, who also worked in finance before becoming a mathematics teacher. 

Both grew up in Dhaka before moving to the United Kingdom, where they went to university. Chowdhury told TechCrunch that even while working in finance, his goal was to launch a socially impactful business in Bangladesh. 

At first, Chowdhury looked at fintech because of his career experience, but realized there were already many players focused on financial inclusion in Bangladesh, like bKash. He started thinking about education–Chowdhury’s father is a retired professor and his mother still teaches high school. Then by coincidence, he worked on a client report about the emergence of Indian and Chinese edtech startups, like Byju’s and Toppr. 

“I tried to understand what edtech was and why it was working in those markets and why it didn’t exist in Bangladesh,” said Chowdhury. “When I looked at that closely, there was no reason for it not to exist in Bangladesh. From an macroeconomic perspective, you have all the elements you need. You have a very large population, about 165 million people, and half of that is under the age of 25.”

Chowdhury reached out to Zakaria to lead Shikho’s academic programming. Shikho’s goal is to find more engaging and effective ways to teach students material from the Bangladesh National Curriculum. 

“Not much has changed since my dad was in grade 10 in terms of the syllabus,” said Zakaria. “I’m not a politician, so I can’t bring about change there, but I can change how it’s delivered. We deliver the curriculum in a way that has never been seen before in terms of the pedagogical experience.” 

Shikho launched about a year before the COVID-19 pandemic began, but that didn’t change its approach to product development because it was always meant to be an online learning platform. 

The company works with educators to create content, including animated videos that break down topics into short segments of about six minutes each to help students learn at their own pace. Each video is supplemented with digital resources called smart notes to replace the guidebooks many students buy for studying, and practice questions with detailed solutions.

Shikho’s main video content is pre-recorded, but it will also launch live classes for its app and web portal in about six weeks. The company’s new funding will allow it to scale-up content production, including an app for parents. 

One of the biggest challenges for online learning platforms is keeping students motivated. Chowdhury said Shikho’s gamification system was inspired by the Nike Run Club app. Similar to how Nike Run Club users get points every time they go on a run, Shikho gives students points when they log in, do a test or watch a video. The points can be collected for milestones ranging from beginner to “legend,” and special badges are awarded for accomplishments like finishing a test quickly and accurately. 

The point system also feeds into a leaderboard, so students can see how many points they have compared to other Shikho users at their school, or on the entire app. 

The app is free to use for seven days. One of the company’s plans for its new funding is to launch more freemium content to increase user conversions into paying customers. Chowdhury says that paying users have high engagement rates, typically spending about 45 to 50 minutes daily in the app. Shikho plans to double-down on its user acquisition strategy, including offline sales teams in front of schools, at the end of the year after launching its app for parents. 

“Students are the users and the actual customers are their parents, so we’re conscious that we’re going to have to flip communication to the parents,” said Chowdhury. “That’s part of what this funding round is for.” 

In statement about investment, Anchorless Bangladesh founding partner and CEO Rahat Ahmed said, “Bangladesh has one of the largest allocations of private education expenditure as a percentage of disposable income in the world, but lags behind countries like India and Indonesia when it comes to edtech funding. The market is primed for growth and we believe the team at Shikho is well-fit to lead the charge and take education to the next level.” 

For fleet managers, managing shipping crew changes across different countries is an elaborate process even in the best of times—and now is definitely not the best of times. Greywing, a Y Combinator-backed platform for automating maritime operations, launched a new solution today that it describes as an industry-first. Called Crew Change, it is used to help shipping companies manage testing, quarantine and other COVID-19 regulations for their crew members.

Crew Change draws on data from S5 Agency World, a global port agency, to keep on top of quarantine, testing and vaccination requirements, which are constantly changing. Greywing co-founder and chief executive officer Nick Clarke says Crew Change can potentially save fleet managers millions of dollars by streamlining crew changes, finding the most cost-effective flights for transporting crew, planning routes (or rerouting if necessary) and reducing delays, which have a trickle-down effect on the rest of the supply chain.

Greywing’s other solutions help fleet operators manage important tasks, like assessing sea routes for piracy risks and transporting crew to ships. Clarke told TechCrunch in an email that the company was originally created to help the maritime industry to mitigate risks in the Gulf of Guinea and offshore Somalia, which have high rates of piracy, by delivering rapid intelligence about those shipping lanes.

“We discovered that by going beyond this, we could deliver intelligence on where their crew could disembark to solve what was top of mind for seafarers—getting home to their families,” he said.

When the COVID-19 pandemic started, Greywing started getting requests from clients who urgently needed help to manage crew changes. “They had personnel trapped on vessels unable to get on and off all over the world. My co-founder Hrishi [Olickel] and I examined the problem and seeing the growing complexity of global lockdowns, realized it was a problem that was here to stay.”

Crew managers have to stay on top of changing immigration restrictions in hundreds of countries and thousands of ports around the world, Clarke added. To complicate things further, many crews include members of different nationalities, who are often subject to different restrictions.

Much of the crew change process is analog. For example, a manager of a vessel chartered to a third-party may only find out its next destination by emailing the ship’s captain. Crew changes are often planned through spreadsheets, and flight bookings are done through email or phone.

“Even before the pandemic, crew change management was a classic problem that has always been hard to navigate, but with a few more levels of consideration added to that data at random, it became totally impractical for even a team of humans to make sense of,” said Clarke.

Greywing was able to create Crew Change by making small changes to its piracy risk mitigation methodology, and it is now integrated into CRY4, Greywing’s risk reporting solution.

The company worked with S5 Agency World because it “is regarded as one of the leading global port agencies which services port offices worldwide,” Clarke said. “What that means is their data is able to give us a clear picture of what’s happening on the ground so shipping owners can better predict and manage what’s happening on the seas.” Crew Change also uses data from 30 other public and private data APIs and is planning to add another 20 data sources.

Thanks to its wide range of data sources, Clarke said that Crew Change is able to update information about visa, quarantine and testing requirements in as little as 15 minutes (or a day for more complex data).

You may well recognize Cassie as the basis of Agility Robotics’ delivery bot, Digit. If you’ve been following the tech’s progression at all, however, you no doubt know that it started life as the ostrich-inspired Cassie. The robot is all legs and not much else.

In addition to fueling Agility’s commercial ambitions, the robot has proven a solid platform for exploring bipedal location. Announced by Oregon State University professor Jonathan Hunt in 2017, Cassie was created with the aim of a $1 million grant from the DoD — a pretty familiar story in the robotics world.

Today, a team from the Dynamics Robotics Laboratory in OSU’s College of Engineering highlighted the ways they’re continuing to push Cassie to its bipedal limits. The team says the robot was able to run a 5K untethered, on a single charge. Cassie’s not going to beat any human world records anytime soon, but the 53-minute (and three second) run was still an impressive exhibition for the tech.

The robot’s run time included around 6.5 minutes of troubleshooting, as the team dealt with an overheated computer and a botched turn that knocked it off its legs.

“Cassie is a very efficient robot because of how it has been designed and built, and we were really able to reach the limits of the hardware and show what it can do,” Ph.D. student Jeremy Dao said in a statement.

According to the team, Cassie essentially taught itself to run using a deep reinforcement learning algorithm, which allowed the system to figure out how to stay upright by shifting its balance while running.

“Deep reinforcement learning is a powerful method in AI that opens up skills like running, skipping and walking up and down stairs,” undergrad student Yesh Godse adds.

In May of this year, the OSU team also demonstrated how Cassie can walk up and down stairs without the aid of lidar or on-board cameras.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 27, 2021. Today is a good day not only because the U.S. women’s national soccer team is heading to the Olympics quarter finals (shoutout Gotham’s Carli Lloyd!), but also because Danny Crichton just published an incredibly interesting EC-1 digging into RapidSOS. Danny has previously written extensively about disaster tech, a growth industry of sorts given the changing climate. OK, now to tech news! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Edtech’s shifting center of gravity: The debris is still settling after China’s recent regulatory changes impacted edtech, on-demand and music-streaming businesses in the country. Natasha Mascarenhas dug into the edtech market, asking investors where they planned to invest in the future. The gist is that while China was once the center of the edtech universe, it may rapidly lose that crown to a more global set of edtech hotspots.
• Africa’s burgeoning startup ecosystem: TechCrunch’s long-running dive into the Q2 venture capital market is coming to a close this week, but not before we investigated the African startup market, a growing space that is attracting more and more investor and media attention. Some big exits certainly haven’t hurt. But while capital raised by African startups is growing rapidly, some blank spaces still exist. Let’s see if investors pounce.
• No-code is still super hot: If you want to have a weird day on Twitter, tweet that you don’t like no-code as a concept. You will get many notes from folks who disagree. That passion among the hoi polloi is also reflected in investor interest. This time ‘round the funding tree it’s Bubble, which just closed a $100 million round to help anyone “begin building modern web applications using a click-and-drag interface that can connect data sources and other software together in one fluid interface,” per our reporting.

Startups/VC

Kicking off today’s startup notes, let’s talk about stock. Startup shares, to be precise. Mostly investors get preferred shares, because they can demand better equity as they are bringing capital to the table. Founders and staff tend to get common stock. Which, as the name implies, is not as good as preferred. But there’s a venture capital firm in Boston called Pillar VC that buys common stock in its investments. One of its investors, Jamie Goldstein, wrote an essay for TechCrunch sharing what he’s learned from the process. It’s worth reading.

Before we get into funding rounds, NowRx CEO and co-founder Cary Breese wrote an op-ed for TechCrunch discussing the delivery market. Given how much money is flowing into so-called instant grocery startups, it’s also worth your time.

• $200M for sensors as a service: That’s the news from Wiliot, which has just put a bunch of SoftBank Vision Fund 2 money into its pockets to turn its “ultra thin and light” processor that “runs on ambient power” into a service that it can sell to others. Very cool.
• Meet the latest crypto unicorn: It’s Fireblocks — with its new $310 million round, the company is now worth $2.2 billion. What does it do? According to our own reporting, Fireblocks “aims to offer financial institutions an all-in-one platform to run a digital asset business, providing them with infrastructure to store, transfer and issue digital assets.” Between this and the recent FTX deal, it’s clear that there is still ample investor appetite for continued crypto wagers.
• 1Password raises $100M more: Accel is at it again, putting big checks into largely self-sustaining businesses This time it’s a double down on 1Password, a software service that helps individuals and businesses alike create and manage supersecure passwords. The company competes with LastPass, among other companies. The company is now worth $2 billion and recently crossed the $120 million ARR milestone. That’s pretty darn good, even if the company’s revenue multiple implies that it is no longer growing at startup speeds. (How about an S-1? Anyone?)
• Oova wants to help people conceive: The startup just landed a $1.2 million round to help folks figure out their optimum fertility window and provide information that their healthcare provider may be able to use to confirm ovulation. There are two groups of people in the world. Those who have not dealt with fertility-related issues, and those who have. For the latter set, Oona’s newly released kit and goals are good news.

The RapidSOS EC-1

According to one estimate, Americans place 240 million 911 calls each year.

Sending emergency services to the right location sounds straightforward, but each call is routed through one of thousands of call centers known as public safety answering points (PSAPs).

“Every 911 center is very different and they are as diverse and unique as the communities that they serve,” said Karin Marquez, senior director of public safety at RapidSOS.

One PSAP that serves New York City is a 450,000-square-foot, blast-resistant cube set on nine acres, but “you have agencies in rural America that have one person working 24/7 and they’re there to answer three calls a day,” Marquez noted.

Founded eight years ago, RapidSOS processes more than 150 million emergencies each year across approximately 5,000 PSAPs. The company’s technology helps call centers integrate requests from cell phones, landlines and IoT devices.

“Its technology is almost certainly integrated into the smartphone you’re carrying and many of the devices you have lying around,” Managing Editor Danny Crichton writes in a four-part series that studies the company’s origins:

• Part 1: The early years and why a consumer app company turned to govtech and integrated services for technology and device companies.
• Part 2: How RapidSOS made its pivot and why its current business model has performed so well.
• Part 3: To transform 911 services, RapidSOS established dozens of corporate and individual partnerships.
• Part 4: Examines the future of 911 and RapidSOS in light of limited infrastructure funding.

“I’ve honestly never met a company like RapidSOS with so many signed partnerships,” says Danny, who initially wrote about the firm six years ago.

“It’s closed dozens of partnerships and business development deals, and with some of the biggest names in tech. How does it do it? This story is about how it built a successful BD engine.”

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Big Tech Inc.

TechCrunch is about to dive into a whole mess of Big Tech earnings in a moment, so we’ll be brief regarding Big Tech news today. Here’s a rapid-fire rundown:

• Shopify allows merchants to sell NFTs directly through their storefronts: The popular Canadian e-commerce platform supporting NFTs could be a boon to their broader adoption.
• Instagram now supports 60-second videos on Reels, its TikTok clone: Every major social network wants a piece of TikTok’s magic. Let’s see if Instagram can capture some of that sparkle.
• Google TV mobile app redesign adds new services and recommendations: Google TV is the updated Chromecast interface, if you were wondering. The redesign includes Rotten Tomatoes scores, just in case you want some extra input on what to watch.
• Pinterest rolls out new features that let creators make money from pins: More shoppable content at Pinterest? Not a surprise, but perhaps something that will allow the company to continue posting above-expectations revenue growth.

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