Author: azeeadmin

Canvas Ventures is expanding its team of three general partners to four with the hiring of Mike Ghaffary, a former general partner at Social Capital.

An experienced operator and investor, Ghaffary was previously the chief executive officer of Yelp subsidiary Eat24, as well as the co-founder and vice president of the podcast platform Stitcher.

Ghaffary joins Paul Hsiao, Gary Little and Rebecca Lynn as GPs at Canvas, which backs early-stage startups with $5 million to $20 million. The firm focuses on fintech, marketplaces, digital health and new enterprise with a portfolfio that includes text messaging platform Hustle and video security startup Owl. Ghaffary, in particular, will seek out consumer tech, marketplaces and software businesses.  

Ghaffary, a long-time angel investor, has been focused exclusively on solo dealmaking since leaving Social Capital, the fund led by Chamath Palihapitiya, in late August. After two years at the firm, Ghaffary announced his departure. Ghaffary was among several staffers to depart Social Capital last summer, shortly before Palihapitiya announced the firm would no longer raise outside capital and would operate as a holding company.

“[Social Capital] just changed a lot from a traditional venture firm,” Ghaffary told TechCrunch. “I realized that where I was most excited to be was a smaller boutique firm focused on Series A and B investing.”

Ghaffary’s portfolio of investments includes Superhuman, Strava and Skip Scooters. The former Yelp executive began his VC career in 2006 as a vice president at Summit Partners before launching Stitcher in 2007.

“I did some serious soul searching at the ten-year mark of operating,” Ghaffary explained. “I said ‘how do I want the next 20 years to look and what do I really enjoy?’ What I really enjoy is meeting and helping the next generation of founders.”

Canvas closed its debut fund in 2013 on $175 million and nearly doubled the effort with a $300 million sophomore vehicle in 2016. Given that the firm fundraises every three years, one can assume Canvas will announce its third fund later this year. Canvas general partner Paul Hsiao, however, declined to comment on the firm’s fundraising activity.

“We are a really focused on building these phenomenal companies and we are happy to have someone on board with 15 years building and investing in companies,” Hsiao told TechCrunch.

Canvas Ventures is expanding its team of three general partners to four with the hiring of Mike Ghaffary, a former general partner at Social Capital.

An experienced operator and investor, Ghaffary was previously the chief executive officer of Yelp subsidiary Eat24, as well as the co-founder and vice president of the podcast platform Stitcher.

Ghaffary joins Paul Hsiao, Gary Little and Rebecca Lynn as GPs at Canvas, which backs early-stage startups with $5 million to $20 million. The firm focuses on fintech, marketplaces, digital health and new enterprise with a portfolfio that includes text messaging platform Hustle and video security startup Owl. Ghaffary, in particular, will seek out consumer tech, marketplaces and software businesses.  

Ghaffary, a long-time angel investor, has been focused exclusively on solo dealmaking since leaving Social Capital, the fund led by Chamath Palihapitiya, in late August. After two years at the firm, Ghaffary announced his departure. Ghaffary was among several staffers to depart Social Capital last summer, shortly before Palihapitiya announced the firm would no longer raise outside capital and would operate as a holding company.

“[Social Capital] just changed a lot from a traditional venture firm,” Ghaffary told TechCrunch. “I realized that where I was most excited to be was a smaller boutique firm focused on Series A and B investing.”

Ghaffary’s portfolio of investments includes Superhuman, Strava and Skip Scooters. The former Yelp executive began his VC career in 2006 as a vice president at Summit Partners before launching Stitcher in 2007.

“I did some serious soul searching at the ten-year mark of operating,” Ghaffary explained. “I said ‘how do I want the next 20 years to look and what do I really enjoy?’ What I really enjoy is meeting and helping the next generation of founders.”

Canvas closed its debut fund in 2013 on $175 million and nearly doubled the effort with a $300 million sophomore vehicle in 2016. Given that the firm fundraises every three years, one can assume Canvas will announce its third fund later this year. Canvas general partner Paul Hsiao, however, declined to comment on the firm’s fundraising activity.

“We are a really focused on building these phenomenal companies and we are happy to have someone on board with 15 years building and investing in companies,” Hsiao told TechCrunch.

After several days of speculation, today NVIDIA confirmed that it would acquire chipmaker Mellanox for $6.9 billion in an all share-deal, in an ongoing consolidation of chipmakers — and in this case those making chips for supercomputers, a crucial market segment in this age of cloud services.

The news caps off what the media had reported as a bidding war between NVIDIA and Intel, but interestingly, this final price is lower than what had been reported as the offering prices from both companies. Intel had been looking to buy for $7 billion, reports had claimed; while NVIDIA was coming in with an $8 billion offer.

All are higher than Mellanox’s closing price on Friday, which was around $5.8 billion. The deal is expected to close at the end of 2019. In a statement, NVIDIA said it would purchase all issued and outstanding common shares of Mellanox for $125 per share in cash.

The deal underscores the ongoing consolidation in the world of processors, and is a key move for NVIDIA to shore up its marketshare specifically in high-performance computing and powering supercomputers. The combined companies will power more than half of the world’s 500 biggest computers, covering “every major cloud service provider and computer maker.”

It also snaps Mellanox out of the hands of other vendors who are focusing energy on the same market. Specifically, Intel has been gearing up its focus on high-performance computing with its range of Cascade Lake chips, while IBM earlier this year unveiled its own efforts by showing off the world’s first commercial quantum computer.

While NVIDIA has focused its energies on computing, Mellanox works across Ethernet and other networking technologies — complementary areas for the two when addressing new computing and data transfer challenges brought about with the rise of AI, cloud services, an explosion of smartphone and other connected device usage, and as-yet nonexistent tech like self-driving cars, which will put even more strain on our data infrastructure.

“The emergence of AI and data science, as well as billions of simultaneous computer users, is fuelling skyrocketing demand on the world’s datacenters,” said Jensen Huang, founder and CEO of NVIDIA, in a statement. “Addressing this demand will require holistic architectures that connect vast numbers of fast computing nodes over intelligent networking fabrics to form a giant datacenter-scale compute engine. We’re excited to unite NVIDIA’s accelerated computing platform with Mellanox’s world-renowned accelerated networking platform under one roof to create next-generation datacenter-scale computing solutions. I am particularly thrilled to work closely with the visionary leaders of Mellanox and their amazing people to invent the computers of tomorrow.”

NVIDIA said it’s interested specifically in Mellanox to “optimize datacenter-scale workloads across the entire computing, networking and storage stack to achieve higher performance, greater utilization and lower operating cost for customers.” It helps that the two have already collaborated together, specifically working on building the world’s two fastest supercomputers, Sierra and Summit, for the U.S. Department of Energy. NVIDIA notes that a number of cloud service providers also work with both vendors.

Once the combination is complete, NVIDIA intends to continue investing in local excellence and talent in Israel, one of the world’s most important technology centers. Customer sales and support will not change as a result of this transaction.

“We share the same vision for accelerated computing as NVIDIA,” said Eyal Waldman, founder and CEO of Mellanox, in a statement. “Combining our two companies comes as a natural extension of our longstanding partnership and is a great fit given our common performance-driven cultures. This combination will foster the creation of powerful technology and fantastic opportunities for our people.”

More to come.

Crypto represent a ‘border-less’ that anyone can own, but actually getting hold it isn’t easy for everyone. Amun, a company that wants to make buying crypto as easy as stock, has pulled in $4 million in funding to offer more established channels for crypto ownership.

The startup currently offers punters an ETP (exchange-traded product) on the Swiss Stock Exchange that pulls together five of the most popular crypto assets: Bitcoin, Ethereum, Bitcoin Cash, XRP and Litecoin. ‘HODL’ — as it is called after ‘holding’ crypto rather than selling it (‘LOL’) — can be purchased just like any stock.

That five-crypto basket is just the start for Amun, which is developing ETPs for other crypto assets individually. The first one is for Bitcoin — ABTC — with others planned to come soon, you’d imagine the usual suspect such as Ethereum and co will follow. Indeed, Amun has licenses to the five crypto assets in HODL as well as EOS.

While the products are ETP and not covered by Collective Investment Schemes Act (CISA), they are protected in custody and by insurance. They are collateralized and backed by an identical amount of crypto assets.

Personally, I’ve been able to buy crypto — just base tokens like Bitcoin and Ethereum rather than company-specific ICO tokens — but it certainly true that it takes some learning. While, speaking for me and likely many others, exchange-based products aren’t easier to me, it does appeal to more institutionally-minded individuals or companies for whom holding an account with an exchange or a crypto wallet isn’t feasible. That’s the target that Amun has in mind, as well as outlier cases, too.

Amun CEO and co-founder Hany Rashwan told TechCrunch that growing up in Egypt, he saw the government ban Bitcoin despite the fact that it offered an alternative to the Egyptian pound, which saw its valuation tank massively in 2016. He believes that products like Amun allow anyone to take part in crypto even when they face local restrictions, as was the case in Egypt and other countries.

“We want to make investing in crypto as easy as buying a stock. Institutional investors around the world are looking for a secure, easy, and regulated way of accessing the crypto asset class. Amun’s products do that at a low price in one of the most reputable financial hubs in the world,” Rashwan told TechCrunch.

Investors share his optimism and those who took part in this round include Boost VC founder Adam Draper — son of outspoken pro-Bitcoin VC Tim Draper — Graham Tuckwell, founder of ETFS Capital who built ETF products for gold, and Greg Kidd, co-founder of investment firm Hard Yaka. Four undisclosed family offices also took part.

One reason for their optimism is the fact that Amun is developing technology that could, in theory, be licensed out to allow others to develop their own ETFs

“We invest a ton of resources in both our product development and underlying tech infrastructure. This allows us to come up with innovative but professional and safe ways of accessing the crypto asset class, as well as do all this on a tech platform that can be used by not just us, but any issuer that wishes to do the same as well,” Rashwan said.

“The world needs a company like Amun to make crypto as easy as buying a stock. Now that they were the first to do that, they can now provide the toolset and be the de-facto platform for anyone else looking to take their crypto assets/securities to the public markets,” Draper added.

Still, just giving people access doesn’t guarantee returns, that’s on the crypto market itself.

Last year was a dud across the board in terms of pricing as Bitcoin, for example, plummeted from a record high of nearly $20,000 at the end of 2017 to $3,930ish at the time of writing. Plenty in the industry are optimistic that will change as genuine value comes out of blockchain technology.

HODL itself debuted at $15.64 last November, today it is at $12.83

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.

Finding myself talking at a startup conference in Kosovo three years ago (as one does), I realized how close I was to Albania, a place which held some fascination for me. I managed to grab a lift with a friendly techie to Tirana, where they arranged for me to speak to the local tech community. That meetup was held in a small co-working space called Talent Garden. It gradually transpired that, while WeWork and other such coworking/offices spaces were concentrating on New York and London, Talent Garden had been busily populating southern and eastern Europe with a network of spaces crisscrossing the continent.

That strategy has now paid off with their desire to raise money from investors. Today, it announces that it’s raised €44M ($49.5M) in a funding round led by Italian private equity firm Tamburi Investment Partners alongside Social Capital, Inadco Ventures and a range of European family offices. Tamburi previously led a €12 million funding round for Talent Garden in 2016.

The company, founded in Brescia, Italy in 2011, now plans to expand its coworking and education to places like Spain, Italy, Denmark, Austria and many more countries around Europe, focusing on second or third-tier cities where tech communities tend to grow fastest because costs are lower than in the major capitals.

Talent Garden’s chief executive and co-founder Davide Dattoli now plans to open 20 new international coworking campuses over the next 5 years and expand the scope of its “Innovation School” in digital training (as an analogy, think a combination of offices and General Assembly) and generating a “second tech ecosystem” around Europe outside London, Paris and Berlin. It’s also a licensee of the SingularityU Summit brand across Italy, Spain and Switzerland, for instance.

So far, it is now present in 8 countries and has 23 active campuses with the Talent Garden Innovation School present in 5 of those countries.

There will, however, be a particular focus on Spain with a brand new location in Madrid and Barcelona; France, with one opening planned in 2019; Italy, where it already has more than 10 campuses; and Austria, where it just recently opened.

In 2018, Talent Garden opened a new campus in Dublin as part of a strategic partnership with Dublin City University and also created a joint venture with Rainmaking Loft in Denmark, and has more than three locations across Copenaghen and is now looking for more locations in the Nordic region. Germany, Israel, Benelux and the CEE region are also within its sights. It won’t be ignoring San Francisco, however, with a kind of the “campus” project planned for next year.

It wouldn’t be Tesla if it didn’t keep us guessing a little… Electric car company Tesla announced that it is making a u-turn of sorts with its sales strategy. After saying at the end of February that it would close down nearly all of its 200-odd retail stores to sell its cars online-only in an effort to bring down the costs of vehicles, today Tesla announced that it would, in fact, keep an expanded number of showrooms open, reducing the closures to around half of the total number it has today.

In return, it will be hiking the prices of its pricier vehicles up by three percent to help support that. “Potential Tesla owners will have a week to place their order before prices rise, so current prices are valid until March 18th,” it noted, adding that the $35,000 Model 3 will not see a price increase. It will only apply to “the more expensive variants of Model 3, as well as Model S and X.”

(As background, when it announced the closures, Tesla reduced prices on these vehicles by six percent, so this is effectively a rise on that discount.)

The locations that will stay open, it should be noted, will be only showrooms: Tesla said it will still only sell cars online.

“Over the past two weeks we have been closely evaluating every single Tesla retail location, and we have decided to keep significantly more stores open than previously announced as we continue to evaluate them over the course of several months,” the company said in a statement late Sunday.

The company closed 10 percent of locations in recent weeks, selecting stores “that didn’t invite the natural foot traffic our stores have always been designed for.” Tesla said that those stores will remain closed, but a further selection of “high visibility” locations — it has a lot of stores in shopping malls and other places where it might pick up incidental traffic alongside those coming specifically with a purpose to see about a Tesla — which hadn’t been meeting sales targets, will now stay open.

A store by any other name

Tesla didn’t give details about how many stores will see a reversal of fortunes, or how many overall will be spared, except to note that about half will stay open.

The stores that have been designated to stay open at this point will have “smaller Tesla crews”, as they will operate more as showrooms, giving information but not selling anything, with people redirected to their phones to make transactions.

It’s sort of a semantic argument, whether these will really still be stores or not. Yes, it’s not clear if would-be buyers will be able to make those purchases at kiosks in stores (it seems like a wasted opportunity if they can’t, given cart abandonment that persists in online shopping). But they will be able to buy using their smartphones: “Tesla owners coming in to stores will simply be shown how to order a Tesla on their phone in a few minutes.”

Further to this, buyers might be just as likely to drive away with a car as they have been in the past: “Stores will also carry a small number of cars in inventory for customers who wish to drive away with a Tesla immediately,” Tesla notes.

On top of the stores that have had an immediate stay of execution, it appears that the company is introducing a kind of stack ranking to figure out what to do next, where it will monitor how they perform to figure out which should stay and which should go. “There are another 20 percent of locations that are under review, and depending on their effectiveness over the next few months, some will be closed and some will remain open,” the company noted.

The company has been under scrutiny and accusations of stack ranking in the past when reducing its workforce. It has made several rounds of layoffs in the last year in an effort to bring the company to profitability and conserve costs as it focused on getting newer models out into the market — underscoring just how complicated the economies of scale can be for anything but the very biggest automakers, and how that compounds when the new entrant is working a disruptive variety of vehicle to boot.

No changes with today’s news to Tesla’s return policy, which covers 1,000 miles or seven days, whichever comes first, as a bypass on offering test drives.

Algolux, founded in 2015, isn’t exactly a household name in the already-crowded world of automotive computer vision. But the Quebec-based startup has generated some interest among investors. For instance, it’s raised $13.4 million, including a $10 million Series A led by General Motors Ventures last May. Not bad, given the fact that it’s remained a virtual unknown, up until now.

Today, Algolux is unveiling Ion, a platform that gives companies a set of tools and an embedded software stack to help them build their own perception systems. It’s essentially a plug-and-play solution, a departure from the common approach today in which companies are confined to siloed systems that often don’t integrate as easily with other systems. 

Algolux’s system brings the company’s machine learning and computer vision technologies to users looking to build an end-to-end solution, incorporating various regulations from governing bodies and safety features designed to help systems operating in tricky environments.

The company says Ion can be used to make more traditional systems, or “radical new designs.” This capability is applicable to any sensor type, processor type, and perception task. Ion relies on the deep neural network Eos and Atlas, a number of different modules designed for camera tuning. It provides developers a mix and match approach based on their individual needs.

In a letter to TechCrunch, VP Dave Tokic notes the key differentiator between the company and its competition is a kind of brand agnosticism that lets companies use different products for different needs and to keep cost down.

China is getting serious about the way live streaming videos affect tens of millions of youngsters, so much so a top authority has proposed to tighten restrictions on underage use.

According to a report from the China Youth Daily, the Communist Party-controlled All Youth Federation recently submitted a proposal during the once-a-year parliamentary session, urging the country to introduce rules for protecting minors online and considers banning those under the age of 18 from hosting live videos.

The suggestion came months after China’s official media slammed video apps for letting content featuring teen moms to run rampant. Kuaishou and ByteDance’s Huoshan, the two video services ensnarled, subsequently apologized and pulled what the paper called “vulgar” and “harmful” videos promoting teen pregnancies.

But authorities concede verbal warnings aren’t enough, for the stakes have grown high for young users and society. For one, the live video format may allow illegal content to more easily fall through the cracks. Young individuals are also more susceptible to scams and may be duped into rewarding streaming hosts big bucks by stealing from their parents.

Aside from blocking minors from being live hosts, the youth union also called for clearer rules around minors’ use of live streaming apps, which can feature everything from esports competitions and makeup tutorials to seductive dances and violent acts. It added that these platforms should allow parents to monitor children’s activity, and any in-app monetary transactions, such as virtual gifting, must require real-name checks. Apps should also get better at sterilizing content, suggested the youth federation.

Such official manifesto is not to be taken lightly as the government’s stance is key to a company’s commercial success in China. Tencent, for instance, lost a staggering $17.5 billion in market value after an op-ed in the Communist Party’s official paper People’s Daily compared its blockbuster game Honor of Kings to “poison” and “drug”.

The live streaming industry is already a frequent target of Beijing, which has stepped up oversight over the Chinese internet in recent years as new media forms emerge. To keep in the government’s good graces, live streaming leaders YY, Momo, Huya, Douyu, Kuaishou and their peers hire armies of content regulators working day and night to screen user-generated content.

The ban proposed by the youth authority is potentially a positive move to society at large in terms of keeping children and adolescents safe. On the other hand, it could be a blow to a flourishing industry.

As many as 425 million people or more than half of China’s internet population were live streaming users as of last June, according to a report from the country’s cybersecurity regulator. More important, these products are having a moment with young people. One in five of China’s internet users who are in senior high school is a “frequently user” of live streaming apps, according to a joint survey put out by the Communist Youth League and the internet agency under China’s Ministry of Information Industry. The ratios for those in junior high school and elementary school are 18.3 percent and 6.4 percent, respectively.

The proposed restriction in live streaming trails a similar curfew in video gaming. Troubled by the rising level of myopia among children and the potentially negative impact of mobile games, Chinese authorities recently announced plans to limit play time among underage users. In another telling move, regulators told teachers to quit assigning app-based homework to slash students’ screen time. This kind of scrutiny is not new, but authorities are demanding stricter identity checks that can involve facial recognition, making it harder for children to find loopholes in the system.

Starling Bank, the U.K. challenger bank founded by banking veteran Anne Boden, is to open a second U.K. office this summer, where it plans recruit up to 50 software engineers and up to 100 customer service team members. The planned location is Southampton, on the south coast of England, and will be Starling’s first office outside of London.

In a call with Boden late on Friday, she told me that the majority of its Southampton office will be new hires who will be helping to build out the challenger back’s business banking product. In just under a year, Starling has garnered more than 30,000 SME business account sign ups, adding to around 500,000 consumer current accounts.

The company plans to invest heavily in its business banking division over the next few years, partly off the back of being awarded a £100 million grant from the Capability and Innovation Fund (CIF), which was set up by Royal Bank of Scotland to fulfil European state aid conditions arising from the bank’s £45 billion U.K. government bailout during the financial crisis.

Boden says that Southampton was chosen as Starling’s new office for its entrepreneurial spirit and high level of tech talent. She says the city is gaining a reputation as a “burgeoning tech hub” and has a growing skilled jobs market and good transport links, including to and from London.

More broadly, she wants Starling to “spread the fintech love” beyond its traditional base of London. There’s an increasing sense that U.K. tech is too London centric and that the country’s fast-growing tech sector and the employment opportunities it represents should be more even distributed.

To that end, Southampton was recently identified in research conducted by global service company CBRE as a technology “Super Cluster” based on the level, concentration and growth of tech sector employment in the city.

The city’s tech scene is also supported by the University of Southampton (where Tim Berners-Lee was previously Chair of Computer Science) and home to the Web Science Institute where Dame Wendy Hall is based. Nearby is also “innovation hub” Southampton Science Park, spanning 72 acres and housing a mixture of commercial offices, laboratories, and meeting and conferencing facilities.

Meanwhile, the news of a second Starling office comes a month after the challenger bank announced it had raised £75 million (~$97 million) in further funding. The new capital consisted of a £60 million Series C round led by Merian Global Investors, including Merian Chrysalis, with £15 million in follow-on funding from Starling’s existing backer and major shareholder Harald McPike. It brings total funding to date for the London-based challenger bank to £133 million, not including the more recent £100 million CIF grant.

Further forward, I’m told Starling is also committed to opening a second regional contact centre to support its growing customer base of SME businesses and individual current account holders. There was previously talk that Wales, the country where Boden hails from, could be chosen, although the bank is also eyeing up the North of England and the Midlands.

It’s impossible to discuss the seismic shift toward automation without a conversation about job loss. Opponent of these technologies criticize a displacement that could some day result wide scale unemployment among what is often considered “unskilled” roles. Advocates, meanwhile, tend to suggest that reports of that nature tend to be overstated. Workforces shift, as they have done for time time immemorial.

During a conversation at SXSW this week, New York congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez offered another take entirely.

“We should not be haunted by the specter of being automated out of work,” she said in an answer reported by The Verge. “We should be excited by that. But the reason we’re not excited by it is because we live in a society where if you don’t have a job, you are left to die. And that is, at its core, our problem.”

The response to an audience member’s question is a take that doesn’t too often get repeated in broader conversations about automation. Often times industry spokespeople will discuss technology’s potential to replace jobs that are deemed “dull, dirty and dangerous” — menial tasks that many roboticists will suggest no one really wants in the first place.

Ocasio-Cortez’s answer, on the other other hand, speaks to a viewpoint more in-line with her own Democratic Socialist views. It’s a suggestion that, if harnessed correctly, such technologies could one day liberate workers from a capitalist system where being a worker is inexorably tied to one’s identity and livelihood.

The newly elected Congresswoman elaborated on her position by pointing out the benefits that automation could bring to a society.

“We should be excited about automation, because what it could potentially mean is more time educating ourselves, more time creating art, more time investing in and investigating the sciences, more time focused on invention, more time going to space, more time enjoying the world that we live in,” The Verge quoted Ocasio-Cortez as saying. “Because not all creativity needs to be bonded by wage.”

And Ocasio-Cortez cited Bill Gates’ suggestion (first floated in a presentation on Quartz) that a robot tax might be a way to make that vision real. “What [Gates is] really talking about is taxing corporations,” she reportedly said. “But it’s easier to say: ‘tax a robot.’”

Her response to the automation question has met with applause from some writers who have been notably prescient about the future.

“This [is] just such a shockingly intelligent thing for any politician to say,” novelist William Gibson said via tweet. It is, at very least, a fresh perspective on a well-trod topic and the kind of outlook that could breath some life in a vital conversation about our collective technological future.

Automation will have an unquestionably profound impact on jobs in the coming decades — we’ve already seen much of that already, for roles in places like warehouses. Every study on the subject acknowledges this, with jobs “destroyed” number in the tens of millions and above, while jobs “created” are often times a fraction of that massive number.

The congresswoman’s comments, however, suggest that, independent of those numbers, perhaps we’ve been asking the wrong the question all along.