Author: azeeadmin

Grab has become the newest addition to the SoftBank Vision Fund after it announced today that it has pulled in a $1.46 billion investment from the super fund. Grab said the new money will be used to further its super app strategy, which is aimed at making its service a daily app for Southeast Asian consumers.

The deal — which was first reported by TechCrunch in December — takes Grab’s ongoing Series H round to $4.5 billion. Other investors in that round include Toyota, Booking Holdings, Microsoft and Hyundai. The new deal means Grab has now raised over $7.5 billion to date. Grab was last valued at $11 billion when it secured a $1 billion investment from Toyota to kick off this Series H in June, but that valuation is likely to have increased significantly since then.

The Vision Fund deal has been months in the making. SoftBank is an existing investor in Grab and, as had already happened with Coupang and Tokopedia, it is transitioning its stake into the Vision Fund while dropping in additional investment capital as well.

“We have been working alongside Grab for a number of years and are privileged to support the evolution of its user-driven technologies. This investment will help the company explore exciting new opportunities across on-demand mobility, delivery and financial services as it continues to grow its offline-to-online platform across Southeast Asia,” said SoftBank’s David Thevenon in a statement.

More to follow, refresh for updates

Yavapai County prosecutors said today that Uber is not criminally liable in a crash last year when one of its self-driving cars fatally struck a pedestrian in Tempe, Arizona.

The autonomous SUV, which had a backup driver behind the wheel, collided with Elaine Herzberg while she was walking across the street. She later died as a result of her injuries. After the crash, Uber suspended its self-driving test program on public roads for nine months.

In a letter to the Maricopa County Attorney, prosecutor Sheila Polk wrote that based on its investigation, the Yavapai County Attorney’s office had determined that a video of the collision “likely does not accurately depict the events that occurred.” While “there is no basis” for Uber to be held criminally liable, Polk recommended that case be referred to Tempe police to collect further evidence related to the vehicle’s backup driver, Rafaela Vasquez. Police said last year Vasquez had been watching streaming videos on her smartphone while sitting behind the wheel.

Polk wrote that her office believes an expert analysis of the video to “closely match what (and when) the person sitting in the driver’s seat of the vehicle would or should have seen that night given the vehicle’s speed, lighting conditions and other relevant factors.”

Though Uber was found not criminally liable in the Tempe crash, The Information reported in December that a Uber manager had sent executives an email to warn about safety issues in its autonomous vehicle unit less than a week before Herzberg was killed.

TechCrunch has contacted Uber for comment.

Minnie Ingersoll has already had an enviable career. After 12 years at Google, working as product manager and later principal with Google.org, she cofounded the venture-backed online car marketplace Shift in 2013, then she left to join the nonprofit Code for America, where she learned entirely new skills, including managing finance and marketing and recruiting.

Now, Ingersoll is taking her skills, know-how and network and putting them to work at the eight-year-old, L.A.-based seed-stage firm TenOneTen Ventures, which she has newly joined as a venture partner.

It’s a move she’d been longing to make, even if she wasn’t entirely honest with herself about it. “I’ve always been interested in VC but I think I was vaguely intimidated by the industry,” she said in a call earlier this afternoon. Despite her background — including a computer science degree from Stanford and a Harvard MBA — she wasn’t always sure she was qualified for a role as an investors.

Turns out that venture firms in L.A. quickly dispelled her of this notion.

While contemplating a move south from the Bay Area because it’s an expensive place to raise a family and because of aging parents in Southern California to whom she wanted to get nearer, Ingersoll found herself talking with local venture firms about executive roles at their portfolio companies. But those talks soon turned into job interviews, she says, which soon turned into repeated talks with one firm in particular: TenOneTen.

It’s the perfect fit for TenOneTen, says the firm’s cofounder, David Waxman. In fact, he says that while the firm had begun looking to hire another investor into the firm beginning last year, it only realized over time — while Ingersoll was meeting with some of TenOneTen’s portfolio companies as a kind of advisor — that he need look no further than Ingersoll, who felt very much part of the team straightaway.

Ingersoll voices a similar sentiment, saying she has fallen in love with L.A.’s collaborative seed-stage venture scene broadly, but adding that she was most attracted to TenOneTen because the young firm “feels like a scrappy startup with an unassuming techie team made of up hard-working engineers.” It’s a comfortable place for her to be, she suggests.

As for what Ingersoll will be funding, she says to stay tuned. TenOneTen typically writes $1 million checks to seed-stage companies, often as part of a syndicate, but its mandate is fairly broad. While Ingersoll remains interested in consumer tech and mobility, she suggests that a not a lot is off the table.

Among the firm’s newest bets, for example, is HiHello, a year-old, Palo Alto, Ca.-based developer of digital business cards that can be exchanged seamlessly and that earlier this month announced $2.5 million in seed funding, including from K9 Ventures and August Capital.

Another of its bets is CREXi, a 3.5-year-old, Venice, Ca.-based commercial real estate marketplace that went on to raise $11 million in Series A funding last year, including from Jackson Square Ventures, Manifest Investment Partners, Lerer Hippeau, Freestyle Capital, and Founder Collective.

Your startup needs customers to survive. If and when you make sales or generate installs, you are wading into the fast moving stream of commerce and exposing yourself to risk. Well-drafted customer contracts limit your liability and create legally enforceable rights to get paid for your work. In fact, contracts are actually dispute prevention mechanisms, forcing parties on either side to clearly define what is supposed to happen in advance, aligning expectations and increasing the likelihood that all goes according to plan.

So developing a working understanding of contracts generally, a deep understanding of your core customer contracts specifically, and hiring a competent lawyer to draft key contracts from the beginning, together represent an investment that will pay dividends over the life of your startup.

This article, the third in Extra Crunch’s exclusive “Startup Law A to Z” series, follows previous articles on intellectual property (IP) and corporate matters. If you are tuning in now, this series is designed to provide founders enough information to intelligently analyze business circumstances vis-à-vis certain common legal issues startups face. These articles are detailed and admittedly lengthy, but the concepts discussed are critical for founders to understand deeply.

If after reading this or other articles in the “Startup Law A to Z” series, you identify legal risks facing your startup, then other Extra Crunch resources can help. For example, the Verified Experts of Extra Crunch include detailed profiles of “Verified Expert Lawyers” – some of the most experienced and skilled startup lawyers in practice today. You can and should use these resources to identify attorneys focused on serving companies at your stage with experience in the particular matters at hand and simply reach out for further guidance.

The Customer Contracts checklist:

Contract Law Generally

• Contract Formation
• Term and Termination
• Breach and Remedies

Terms of Use vs. End User License Agreements

• Distinctions and Key Provisions
• Enforceability through Click-Wrap Agreements
• Notice of Amendments and Revisions

Privacy Policies

• State, Federal, International Laws:
  • CCPA
  • CalOPPA
  • Required under Cal. Bus. & Prof. Code § 22575(a)
  • FTC (COPPA, HIPAA, Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act)
  • GDPR
• Disclosure and Enforceability

NDAs

• Mutual vs. One-Way
• Definition of Confidential Information
• Residual Clauses
• Non-Solicit and Non-Competes

Master Services Agreements and Service Level Agreements

• Y-Combinator “Sales Agreement” / MSA Template
• Deal Terms, Legal Terms, Boilerplate Terms
• Legal Terms Explained:
  • Warranty and Disclaimer
  • Indemnity (and Insurance)
  • Limitation of Liability

Contract law generally

What is a contract? Any law student preparing for the bar exam will tell you, in monotone: “a contract is a promise or set of promises, for breach of which the law provides a remedy, or the performance of which the law recognizes as a duty.”

Simple enough, but which law? For contracts, it is primarily the “common law” which governs contracts, that is, law derived from judicial decisions and not government-enacted statutes (historical background courtesy of UC Berkeley). That said, contracts for the sale of “goods” are governed by specifically promulgated rules set forth in the Uniform Commercial Code (or “UCC”). And yes, in certain circumstances, courts have found that software may be considered “goods” for this purpose, see On Contracts.

For a long time, it was the norm for founders to haul their hardware to the 3000 block of Sand Hill Road, where the venture capitalists of “Silicon Valley” would be awaiting their pitches. Today, many of the investors that touted the exclusivity of “The Valley” have moved north to San Francisco, where they have better access to top entrepreneurs.

Y Combinator, a Silicon Valley institution and to many the lifeblood of the startups and venture capital ecosystem, is the latest to pack up shop. YC, which invests $150,000 for 7 percent equity in a few hundred startups per year, is currently searching for a space in SF to operate its accelerator program, sources close to YC confirm to TechCrunch, because the majority of YC’s employees and its portfolio founders reside in the city.

Founded in 2005, YC’s roots are in Mountain View, California. In its first four years, YC offered programs in Cambridge, Massachusetts and Mountain View before opting in 2009 to focus exclusively on The Valley. In late 2013, as more and more of its partners and portfolio companies were establishing themselves in SF, YC opened a satellite office in the city in what would be the beginning of its journey northbound.

The small satellite office, used to support SF-based staff and provide portfolio companies resources and workspace, is located in Union Square. The fate of YC’s Mountain View office is unclear.

YC’s move north will be the latest in a series of small changes that, together, point to a new era for the Sam Altman-run accelerator. Approaching its 15th birthday, YC announced in September it was changing up the way it invests. No longer would it seed startups with $120,000 for 7 percent equity, it would give startups an additional 30,000 to cover the expenses of getting a business off the ground and it would admit a whole lot more companies.

YC began mentoring its largest cohort of companies to date in late 2018. The astonishing 200-plus group in its winter 2019 batch is more than 50 percent larger than the 132-team cohort that graduated in spring 2018. To accommodate the truly gigantic group at YC Demo Days later this month (March 18 and 19), YC has moved to a new venue, SF’s Pier 48. Historically, YC Demo Days were hosted at the Computer History Museum near its home in Mountain View.

YC has also ditched “Investor Day,” which is typically an opportunity for investors to schedule meetings with startups that just completed the accelerator program. YC writes that the decision came “after analyzing its effectiveness.” On top of that, rumors suggest YC is planning to put an end to Demo Days. Other accelerators, AngelPad for example, put a stop to the tradition last year after realizing demo day was more of a stress to startup founders than a resource. Sources close to YC, however, tell TechCrunch these rumors are categorically false.

YC isn’t the first accelerator to ditch its Silicon Valley digs. 500 Startups, a smaller yet still prolific accelerator, opened an SF satellite office the same year as YC, and in 2018, the nine-year-old program made the decision to permanently relocate to SF. Venture capital firms, too, have realized the opportunities are larger in SF than on Sand Hill Road.

The transition from the peninsula to the city began around 2012, when VC heavyweights like Uber and Twitter-backer Benchmark opened an office in SF’s mid-market neighborhood. Months later, 47-year-old Kleiner Perkins, an investor in Stripe and DoorDash, opened the doors to its new workplace in SF’s South Park neighborhood.

Around that same time a whole bunch of firms followed suit: Shasta Ventures, Norwest Venture Partners, Accel, GV, General Catalyst and NEA opened SF shops, to name a few. Many of these firms, Benchmark, Kleiner and Accel, for example, held onto their Silicon Valley locations. Firms like True Ventures and Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund planted stakes in SF years prior. Both firms have operated SF offices since 2005; True Ventures, for its part, has managed a Palo Alto office from the get-go, as well.

“When we first started, it was [expected] that it would be maybe 60-40 Peninsula to the city; it’s actually turned out to be 80-20 SF to The Valley,” True Ventures co-founder Phil Black told TechCrunch. “For us, it was important to be near our customer: the founder. It’s important for us to be in and around where founders are doing their things.”

The transition out of The Valley is ongoing. Other VC funds are still in the process of opening their first SF offices as more partners beg for shorter commutes. Khosla Ventures, for example, is currently searching for an SF headquarters.

Silicon Valley real estate will likely remain a hot — or warm, at least — commodity, however. Why? Because long-time investors have lives established in that part of the bay, where they’ve built homes in well-kept, affluent cities like Woodside, Atherton and Los Altos.

Still, Y Combinator’s move highlights an increasingly adopted mantra: Silicon Valley isn’t the goldmine it used to be. For the best deals and greatest access to entrepreneurs, SF takes the cake — for now, that is. But with rising rents and a changing attitude toward geographically diverse founders, how long SF will remain the destination for top talent is an entirely different question.

That was unexpected, including to his FDA colleagues, apparently.

FDA Commissioner Scott Gottlieb resigned today from his post, an administration official tells the Washington Post, adding that Gottlieb will relinquish the office in one month.

Unlike many people who leave the Trump Administration, the resignation wasn’t sought out or expected, reports the Post, which notes Gottlieb has recently hired senior staff and been actively and aggressively dividing into new initiatives.

In fact, while Gottlieb has since tweeted a statement from U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar, commending Gottlieb as an “exemplar public health leader,” he was earlier today retweeting an interview he’d given on air with CNBC this morning in which he said the FDA was putting 15 national retailers on notice for allegedly selling tobacco products and e-cigs to minors.

He also today pointed his Twitter followers to newly released guidance by the FDA around new steps it’s taking to protect Americans from intentionally adulterated food products.

According to the official who spoke with the Post, Gottlieb has tired of commuting to Washington from his home in Westport, Ct., and wants to spend more time with his family, including his wife and three young daughters.

Still, the timing certainly seems odd, particularly given Gottlieb’s very public, and unfinished, fight against vaping, which has become one of the hallmarks of his time as FDA Commissioner. Indeed, beginning last spring, Gottlieb began ringing the alarm bells on e-cigarettes and their fast spread among underage users, saying at a public hearing in January that levels of e-cig use among young people is reaching new heights, with vaping rates nearly doubling among high school students between 2017 and 2018.

Tobacco stocks have already risen on the news. One suspects that execs at the privately held company Juul, which has been a specific target of Gottlieb given its popularity with young users and is now roughly one-third owned by tobacco giant Altria Group, are also feeling some relief at the news of his resignation.

Gottlieb was nominated by Donald Trump to serve in his current post almost exactly two years ago, though he’d worked as the FDA’s Deputy Commissioner for Medical and Scientific Affairs from 2005 to 2007. In between, Gottlieb, a trained physician, was a venture capitalist focused on healthcare investing with the firm New Enterprise Associates, which just happens to be closing its biggest fund ever right now.

Kobalt, a 19-year-old, London-based music services company that operates as both a music publisher and a service-based music company — among other things, it helps artists collect the royalties owed them — is reportedly raising a new round of funding that could surpass $100 million.

Music Business Worldwide (MBW) reported on the round yesterday, with Kobalt founder and CEO Willard Ahdritz confirming that the news is directionally correct without divulging precisely how much capital Kobalt is closing on currently.

The new funding comes about one year after Kobalt closed on its most recent funding, which valued the company at roughly $800 million, as TC had reported at the time.

A large part of Kobalt’s appeal to investors, as well as the artists, publishers and labels that are among its customers, is the content management system it has created and that makes it far easier and more transparent to capture the millions of incremental plays happening across streaming platforms like Apple Music, Spotify, and Soundcloud — then to collect money where it is due.

The company is made up of numerous parts, however, including Kobalt Music Publishing; Kobalt Neighbouring Rights; a recorded music division called AWAL (Artists Without a Label) into which Kobalt sunk $150 million last year to expand the business; and a collection agency that Kobalt acquired in 2015 AMRA. That’s short form for what was previously called the American Mechanical Rights Agency.

Kobalt also oversees Kobalt Capital, an acquisitive fund managed by KMG.

Kobalt’s investors to date have included GV;  Section 32, whose founder, Bill Maris, was previously the CEO of GV; Hearst Entertainment; Balderton Capital; and MSD Capital, a private investment firm that exclusively manages the capital of Michael Dell and his family.

According to MBW, Kobalt is currently talking with investment banks to pull together its mega round. Though Ahdritz would not state the express amount that Kobalt is targeting, he told the outlet that the fresh capital will be used to grow Kobalt’s presence in each of its verticals.

He added that its record vision, AWL, is particularly eager to challenge traditional and, as he sees it, outdated, record labels that tend to benefit a limited number of artists at the expense of so many others.

AWAL, as described last year by the Financial Times, offers musicians marketing and promotional services but lets them keep the copyright to their material, and has already drawn both new and established artists, including Nick Cave and De La Soul. Though they maintain ownership of their royalties, they share revenue with Kobalt in return for its services.

Disrupt San Francisco 2019 — the epic, three-day conference celebrating early-stage startups — may not take place until October 2-4, but it’s never too soon for serious savings. Want to shave $500 off the price of admission? Heck yeah, you do!

Here’s the deal. Registration officially opens later this month. Simply sign up for our mailing list before registration opens, and you’ll keep five Benjamins in your pocket. Cha-ching.

It’s the easiest way to experience everything Disrupt SF 2019 has to offer and save a bundle in the process. Need a reminder of what you’ll find at TechCrunch Disrupt? Let’s start with the speakers. We’re building an outstanding line up of leading founders, technologists, investors and tech icons. Past speakers have included people such as Whitney Wolfe-Herd, founder of Bumble, Tristan Walker, CEO of Walker & Company Brands and Aileen Lee, founder of Cowboy Ventures.

For a pure adrenaline rush, you can’t beat Startup Battlefield, the world-famous pitch competition. Only the best startups get to compete head-to-head for a $100,000 equity-free cash prize, the Disrupt Cup and potentially life-changing investor and media attention. Last year, Forethought took home the title and the cash infusion. Think your startup has what it takes to make the cut? Apply here to compete in Startup Battlefield.

Don’t forget to take a deep dive in Startup Alley — a networking paradise ripe with inspiration and opportunity. You’ll find hundreds of early-stage startups showcasing their products, tech and talent. It’s also where you’ll find the TC Top Picks. This cohort of startups — selected by TechCrunch editors following a thorough vetting process — represents the very best in these tech categories: Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning,  Blockchain, Biotech/Healthtech, Fintech, Mobility, Privacy/Security, E-commerce, Robotics/IoT/Hardware and more!

Looking for more excitement? Look no further than the TechCrunch Hackathon. This event takes place right alongside Disrupt. Several hundred developers, engineers, students and makers will form ad-hoc teams. Over the course of two days, they’ll code, crack and hack non-stop to create a new product. It’ll require focused determination and mad skills to win best overall hack — along with plenty of coffee, Red Bull and pizza. Come strut your dev stuff and compete in sponsored contests for cash, prizes and TechCrunch swag.

Disrupt SF 2019 offers so much more — workshops, demos, Q&A sessions and killer parties. It all goes down October 2-4 at the Moscone Convention Center. You can experience it all and save $500 — if you sign up for our mailing list before registration officially opens. Click and save, and we’ll see you in October!

Automobili Pininfarina, the automaker brand infused with Pininfarina design house DNA and owned by India’s Mahindra Group, revealed its first production car this week at the Geneva International Motor Show. And it’s an audacious inaugural effort.

The Pininfarina Battista — a nod to design house founder Battista ‘Pinin’ Farina — is an all-electric beast of a hypercar that is faster than a current Formula 1 race car and can travel from 0 to 62 miles an hour in under two seconds. Automobili Pininfarina showcased three Battista design models at the show.

All of them have the same foundation: a carbon fiber monocoque chassis (meaning integrated into body) and carbon fiber body. The electric hypercar has four electric motors (one on each wheel) and a power output of 1,400 kW, or the equivalent of 1,900 horsepower and 2,300 Nm torque. The Battista will have a top speed of more than 223 miles per hour. The 120 kilowatt-hour battery pack, which has a T-shape and is in the central tunnel and behind the seats, will give the vehicle an estimated range of nearly 280 miles.

The interior has the kind of details expected in a multimillion-dollar vehicle. But vehicles like these are expected to be highly customizable, and the Battista is no different. 

The vehicle will be available in 2020. But not just for anyone. Only 150 will be made at the Pininfarina SpA atelier in Turin, Italy. The vehicles will be spread out equally with 50 designed to each major region of North America, Europe and Asia.

The automaker showed off the Battista back in August during Monterey Car Week to select potential customers and some media, including TechCrunch. The Battista, which was codenamed PFO at the time, was displayed in a luxurious home, a setting that befit the vehicle.

As an Italian design house Pininfarina SpA has a long history of partnerships — its relationship with Ferrari perhaps the most famous of them. Automobili Pininfarina appears to be taking the same approach. The automaker has partnered with Pirelli on the tires and Rimac Automobili, the Croatian hypercar and electric vehicle components company that Porsche took a 10 percent stake in last year. Rimac is the battery and drivetrain supplier for Pininfarina.

Rimac should be familiar to hypercar and EV enthusiats. The company, which was founded by Mate Rimac in 2009, brought a two-seater electric hypercar with 1,914-horsepower engine to Geneva last year. 

But it’s not just a small hypercar shop. Rimac also engineers and manufactures high-performance electric vehicle powertrain systems and battery systems. The company has already worked with Renault, Jaguar, and Aston Martin. 

Mahindra bought Pininfarina in 2015 for about $28 million. Three years later, and after additional investment, Mahindra announced the launch of Automobili-Pininfarina as a “new sustainable luxury car brand based in Europe.”