Author: azeeadmin

Facebook’s lead regulator in the European Union must “swiftly” investigate the legality of data-sharing related to a controversial WhatsApp policy update, following an order by the European Data Protection Board (EDPB).

We’ve reached out to the Irish Data Protection Commission (DPC) for a response.

Updated terms had been set to be imposed upon users of the Facebook-owned messaging app early this year — but in January Facebook delayed the WhatsApp terms update until May after a major privacy backlash and ongoing confusion over the details of its user data processing.

Despite WhatsApp going ahead with the policy update, the ToS has continued to face scrutiny from regulators and rights organizations around the world.

The Indian government, for example, has repeatedly ordered Facebook to withdraw the new terms. While, in Europe, privacy regulators and consumer protection organizations have raised objections about how opaque terms are being pushed on users — and in May a German data protection authority issued a temporary (national) blocking order.

Today’s development follows that and is significant as it’s the first urgent binding decision adopted by the EDPB under the bloc’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

Although the Board has not agreed to order the adoption of final measures against Facebook-WhatsApp as the requesting data supervisor, the Hamburg DPA, had asked — saying that “conditions to demonstrate the existence of an infringement and an urgency are not met”.

The Board’s intervention in the confusing mess around the WhatsApp policy update follows the use of GDPR Article 66 powers by Hamburg’s data protection authority.

In May the latter ordered Facebook not to apply the new terms to users in Germany — saying its analysis found the policy granted “far-reaching powers” to WhatsApp to share data with Facebook, without it being clear what legal basis the tech giant was relying upon to be able process users’ data.

Hamburg also accused the Irish DPC of failing to investigate the Facebook-WhatsApp data sharing when it raised concerns — hence seeking to take matters into its own hands by making an Article 66 intervention.

As part of the process it asked the EDPB to take a binding decision — asking it to take definitive steps to block data-sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook — in a bid to circumvent the Irish regulator’s glacial procedures by getting the Board to order enforcement measures that could be applied stat across the whole bloc.

However the Board’s assessment found that Hamburg had not met the bar for demonstrating the Irish DPC “failed to provide information in the context of a formal request for mutual assistance under Article 61 GDPR”, as it puts it.

It also decided that the adoption of updated terms by WhatsApp — which it nonetheless says “contain similar problematic elements as the previous version” — cannot “on its own” justify the urgency for the EDPB to order the lead supervisor to adopt final measures under Article 66(2) GDPR.

The upshot — as the Hamburg DPA puts it — is that data exchange between WhatsApp and Facebook remains “unregulated at the European level”.

Article 66 powers

The importance of Article 66 of the GDPR is that it allows EU data protection authorities to derogate from the regulation’s one-stop-shop mechanism — which otherwise funnels cross border complaints (such as those against Big Tech) via a lead data supervisor (oftentimes the Irish DPC), and is thus widely seen as a bottleneck to effective enforcement of data protection (especially against tech giants).

An Article 66 urgency proceeding allows any data supervisor across the EU to immediately adopt provisional measures — provided a situation meets the criteria for this kind of emergency intervention. Which is one way to get around a bottleneck, even if only for a time-limited period.

A number of EU data protection authorities have used (or threatened to use) Article 66 powers in recent years, since GDPR came into application in 2018, and the power is increasingly proving its worth in reconfiguring certain Big Tech practices — with, for example, Italy’s DPA using it recently to force TikTok to remove hundreds of thousands of suspected underage accounts.

Just the threat of Article 66’s use back in 2019 (also by Hamburg) was enough to encourage Google to suspend manual reviews of audio reviews of recordings captured by its voice AI, Google Assistant. (And later led to a number of major policy changes by several tech giants who had similarly been manually reviewing users’ interactions with their voice AIs.)

At the same time, Article 66 provisional measures can only last three months — and only apply nationally, not across the whole EU. So it’s a bounded power. (Perhaps especially in this WhatsApp-Facebook case, where the target is a ToS update, and Facebook could just wait out the three months and apply the policy anyway in Germany after the suspension order lapses.)

This is why Hamburg wanted the EDPB to make a binding decision. And it’s certainly a blow to privacy watchers eager for GDPR enforcement to fall on tech giants like Facebook that the Board has declined to do so in this case.

Unregulated data-sharing

Responding to the Board’s decision not to impose definitive measures to prevent data sharing between WhatsApp and Facebook, the Hamburg authority expressed disappointment — see below for its full statement — and also lamented that the EDPB has not set a deadline for the Irish DPC to conduct the investigation into the legal basis of the data-sharing.

Ireland’s data protection authority has only issued one final GDPR decision against a tech giant to date (Twitter) — so there is plenty of cause to be concerned that without a concrete deadline the ordered probe could be kicked down the road for years.

Nonetheless, the EDPB’s order to the Irish DPC to “swiftly” investigate the finer-grained detail of the Facebook-WhatsApp data-sharing does look like a significant intervention by a pan-EU body — as it very publicly pokes a regulator with a now infamous reputation for reluctance to actually do the job of rigorously investigating privacy concerns. 

Demonstrably it has failed to do so in this WhatsApp case. Despite major concerns being raised about the policy update — within Europe and globally — Facebook’s lead EU data supervisor did not open a formal investigation and has not raised any public objections to the update.

Back in January when we asked about concerns over the update, the DPC told TechCrunch it had obtained a ‘confirmation’ from Facebook-owned WhatsApp that there was no change to data-sharing practices that would affect EU users — reiterating Facebook’s line that the update didn’t change anything, ergo ‘nothing to see here’. 

“The updates made by WhatsApp last week are about providing clearer, more detailed information to users on how and why they use data. WhatsApp have confirmed to us that there is no change to data-sharing practices either in the European Region or the rest of the world arising from these updates,” the DPC told us then, although it also noted that it had received “numerous queries” from stakeholders who it described as “confused and concerned about these updates”, mirroring Facebook’s own characterization of complaints.

“We engaged with WhatsApp on the matter and they confirmed to us that they will delay the date by which people will be asked to review and accept the terms from February 8th to May 15th,” the DPC went on, referring to a pause in the ToS application deadline which Facebook enacted after a public backlash that saw scores of users signing up to alternative messaging apps, before adding: “In the meantime, WhatsApp will launch information campaigns to provide further clarity about how privacy and security works on the platform. We will continue to engage with WhatsApp on these updates.”

The EDPB’s assessment of the knotty WhatsApp-Facebook data-sharing terms looks rather different — with the Board calling out WhatsApp’s user communications as confusing and simultaneously raising concerns about the legal basis for the data exchange.

In a press release, the EDPB writes that there’s a “high likelihood of infringements” — highlighting purposes contained in the updated ToS in the areas of “safety, security and integrity of WhatsApp IE [Ireland] and the other Facebook Companies, as well as for the purpose of improvement of the products of the Facebook Companies” as being of particular concern.

From the Board’s PR [emphasis its]:

“Considering the high likelihood of infringements in particular for the purpose of safety, security and integrity of WhatsApp IE [Ireland] and the other Facebook Companies, as well as for the purpose of improvement of the products of the Facebook Companies, the EDPB considered that this matter requires swift further investigations. In particular to verify if, in practice, Facebook Companies are carrying out processing operations which imply the combination or comparison of WhatsApp IE’s [Ireland] user data with other data sets processed by other Facebook Companies in the context of other apps or services offered by the Facebook Companies, facilitated inter alia by the use of unique identifiers. For this reason, the EDPB requests the IE SA [Irish supervisory authority] to carry out, as a matter of priority, a statutory investigation to determine whether such processing activities are taking place or not, and if this is the case, whether they have a proper legal basis under Article 5(1)(a) and Article 6(1) GDPR.”

NB: It’s worth recalling that WhatsApp users were initially told they must accept the updated policy or else the app would stop working. (Although Facebook later changed its approach — after the public backlash.) While WhatsApp users who still haven’t accepted the terms continue to be nagged to do so via regular pop-ups, although the tech giant does not appear to be taking steps to degrade the user experience further as yet (i.e. beyond annoying, recurring pop-ups).

The EDPB’s concerns over the WhatsApp-Facebook data-sharing extend to what it says is “a lack of information around how data is processed for marketing purposes, cooperation with the other Facebook Companies and in relation to WhatsApp Business API” — hence its order to Ireland to fully investigate.

The Board also essentially confirms the view that WhatsApp users themselves have no hope of understanding what Facebook is doing with their data by reading the comms material it has provided them with — with the Board writing [emphasis ours]:

“Based on the evidence provided, the EDPB concluded that there is a high likelihood that Facebook IE [Ireland] already processes WhatsApp IE [Ireland] user data as a (joint) controller for the common purpose of safety, security and integrity of WhatsApp IE [Ireland] and the other Facebook Companies, and for the common purpose of improvement of the products of the Facebook Companies. However, in the face of the various contradictions, ambiguities and uncertainties noted in WhatsApp’s user-facing information, some written commitments adopted by Facebook IE [Ireland] and WhatsApp IE’s [Ireland] written submissions, the EDPB concluded that it is not in a position to determine with certainty which processing operations are actually being carried out and in which capacity.”

We contacted Facebook for a response to the EDPB’s order, and the company sent us this statement — attributed to a WhatsApp spokesperson:

“We welcome the EDPB’s decision not to extend the Hamburg DPA’s order, which was based on fundamental misunderstandings as to the purpose and effect of the update to our terms of service. We remain fully committed to delivering secure and private communications for everyone and will work with the Irish Data Protection Commission as our lead regulator in the region in order to fully address the questions raised by the EDPB.”

Facebook also claimed it has controls in place for ‘controller to processor data sharing’ (i.e. between WhatsApp and Facebook) — which it said prohibit it (Facebook) from using WhatsApp user data for its own purposes.

The tech giant went on to reiterate its line that the update does not expand WhatsApp’s ability to share data with Facebook.

GDPR enforcement stalemate

A further vital component to this saga is the fact the Irish DPC has, for years, been investigating long-standing complaints against WhatsApp’s compliance with GDPR’s transparency requirements — and still hasn’t issued a final decision.

So when the EDPB says it’s highly likely that some of the WhatsApp-Facebook data-processing being objected to is already going on it doesn’t mean Facebook gets a pass for that — because the DPC hasn’t issued a verdict on whether or not WhatsApp has been up front enough with users.

tl;dr: The regulatory oversight process is still ongoing.

The DPC provisionally concluded its WhatsApp transparency investigation last year — saying in January that it sent a draft decision to the other EU data protection authorities for review (and the chance to object) on December 24, 2020; a step that’s required under the GDPR’s co-decision-making process.

In January, when it said it was still waiting to receive comments on the draft decision, it also said: “When the process is completed and a final decision issues, it will make clear the standard of transparency to which WhatsApp is expected to adhere as articulated by EU Data Protection Authorities.”

Over a half a year later and WhatsApp users in the EU are still waiting to find out whether the company’s comms lives up to the required legal standard of transparency or not — with their data continuing to pass between Facebook and WhatsApp in the meanwhile.

The Irish DPC was contacted for comment on the EDPB’s order today and with questions on the current status of the WhatsApp transparency investigation.

It told us it would have a response later today — we’ll update this report when we get it.

Back in November the Irish Times reported that WhatsApp Ireland had set aside €77.5M for “possible administrative fines arising from regulatory compliance matters presently under investigation”. No fines against Facebook have yet been forthcoming, though.

Indeed, the DPC has yet to issue a single final GDPR decision against Facebook (or a Facebook-owned company) — despite more than three years having passed since the regulation started being applied.

Scores of GDPR complaints against the Facebook’s data-processing empire — such as this May 2018 complaint against Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp’s use of so-called ‘forced consent’ — continue to languish without regulatory enforcement in the EU because there’s been no decisions from Ireland (and sometimes no investigations either).

The situation is a huge black mark against the EU’s flagship data protection regulation. So the Board’s failure to step in more firmly now — to course-correct — does look like a missed opportunity to tackle a problematic GDPR enforcement bottleneck.

That said, any failure to follow the procedural letter of the law could invite a legal challenge that unpicked any progress. So it’s hard to see any quick wins in the glacial game of GDPR enforcement.

In the meanwhile, the winners of the stalemate are of course the tech giants who get to continue processing people’s data how they choose, with plenty of time to work on reconfiguring their legal, business and system structures to route around any enforcement damage that does eventually come.

Hamburg’s deputy commissioner for data protection, Ulrich Kühn, essentially warns as much in a statement responding to the EDPB’s decision in a statement — in which he writes:

“The decision of the European Data Protection Board is disappointing. The body, which was created to ensure the uniform application of the GDPR throughout the European Union, is missing the opportunity to clearly stand up for the protection of the rights and freedoms of millions of data subjects in Europe. It continues to leave this solely to the Irish supervisory authority. Despite our repeated requests over more than two years to investigate and, if necessary, sanction the matter of data exchanges between WhatsApp and Facebook, the IDPC has not taken action in this regard. It is a success of our efforts over many years that IDPC is now being urged to conduct an investigation. Nonetheless, this non-binding measure does not do justice to the importance of the issue. It is hard to imagine a case in which, against the background of the risks for the rights and freedoms of a very large number of data subjects and their de facto powerlessness vis-à-vis monopoly-like providers, the urgent need for concrete action is more obvious. The EDPB is thus depriving itself of a crucial instrument for enforcing the GDPR throughout Europe. This is no good news for data subjects and data protection in Europe as a whole.“

In further remarks the Hamburg authority emphasizes that the Board noted “considerable inconsistencies between the information with which WhatsApp users are informed about the extensive use of their data by Facebook on the one hand, and on the other the commitments made by the company to data protection authorities not (yet) to do so”; and also that it “expressed considerable doubts about the legal basis on which Facebook intends to rely when using WhatsApp data for its own or joint processing” — arguing that the Board therefore agrees with the “essential parts” of its arguments against WhatsApp-Facebook data sharing.

Despite carrying that weight of argument, the call for action is once again back in Ireland’s court.

Netradyne, a startup that uses cameras and edge computing to improve commercial driver safety, has scored $150 million in Series C funding. The fresh cash will help the company double down on its current product, Driveri, according to Avneesh Agrawal, CEO and co-founder.

Earlier this year, Netradyne partnered with Amazon to install its hardware and software in its delivery vehicles. The tech giant has faced accusations that it puts speed and efficiency over driver safety, all the while avoiding liability for accidents by employing third-party firms. 

Other companies may not have that same morally dubious luxury, which makes Netradyne’s service all the more relevant for fleets. Commercial auto insurance rates are expected to climb 14.2% in 2021, in large part due to distracted drivers using smartphones, which has increased the number of accidents resulting in death, according to a report by insurance company Alera Group. The study also found the cost of repairing modern vehicles and medical costs continue rising at rates higher than inflation. Fleet managers looking to cut costs might be lured by promises of safer driving behavior. 

“Nuclear verdicts, in which judgements exceed $10 million, have gone up by almost 500% according to some statistics,” Agrawal told TechCrunch. “It’s becoming the biggest expense for commercial fleets, pretty much after the drivers and fuel. There are a lot of commercial insurance carriers actually going out of business, or they’re passing on the risk to the fleets.”

If Agrawal is to be believed, Netradyne’s service is very much in demand, with subscribers and annual recurring revenue increasing three times in 2020. The CEO would not share the base, but he did say Netradyne has over 1,000 customers today. 

Netradyne has an agreement with National Interstate Insurance that subsidizes the company’s product, but generally Netradyne sells to a fleet. The pitch is that the fleet should see a reduction in accidents and can then take that data to insurance companies to negotiate better claims. 

Netradyne doesn’t provide an average of how its cameras and software has made driving safer, but anecdotally, Agrawal said a couple of the companies that have used the product saw claims decrease by up to 80% in a year.

So how does it work?

Netradyne, which combines netra which means “vision” in Sanskrit and dyne which is a unit of power or force in Greek, has built a full stack system that is purely vision-based, according to Agrawal. That means cameras in simpler terms. The system comes in two form factors. The D-210, built for small-to-medium-sized vehicles is a dual-facing dashcam featuring both an inward and outward-facing camera, recording both the driver and the road. The D-410 has four HD cameras providing a 360-degree picture, which includes two side window views, and is better suited for heavy duty vehicles.

The cameras pick up anything from a driver being cut off and correctly slowing down to create space between the vehicles to a driver being distracted by texting. A device that connects to the cloud is on board the vehicle, and it’s on the edge of that device that real-time computations are done, which might result in the driver getting feedback and automated suggestions like “please slow down” or “distracted driving.” 

“Most importantly, we track the positive driving behavior because we want to change the discussion with the drivers,” said Agrawal. “Drivers are so used to being penalized, and in most cases, it’s actually after the incident has happened or based on a customer’s complaint. This is very proactive and it’s positive.” 

In the moment, rewarding behavior can look like a notification to the driver, giving them a little dopamine hit that might encourage continued good driving. Drivers are rewarded with DriverStars, an attempt to gamify commercial operations by encouraging them to rack up points. Those points may be converted to bonuses or other incentives.

“The drivers are the biggest assets for the fleet, and traditionally, if you ask the fleets, who are your worst drivers, they’ll tell you who because they are the ones who got into accidents, who customers have complained about,” said Agrawal. “If you ask them who are your safer drivers, they can’t really tell, but in our situation because we micro identify not just the drivers who haven’t gotten into accidents, but also drivers are actually being proactive with safe driving behaviour, fleets can focus on those drivers and create retention packages, give them incentives, make them into managers and leadership positions.”

Of course, there’s another upside to all this data collection on driver behavior. Agrawal says his company collects about 700 million miles per month worth of data, analyzing it to identify every potential scenario a driver can get themselves into. And it’s all being done on the edge, which is an experiment in and of itself. 

“Investing in autonomous driving is definitely a possibility, but it’s not our focus right now,” said Agrawal.

This Series C round was led by SoftBank Vision Fund 2. Existing investors Point72 Ventures and M12 also participated in the round, bringing Netradyne’s total funding to over $197 million. Agrawal told TechCrunch the company aims to make $100 million in revenue by the end of the year.

The gamification of payments is not a new concept.

A number of companies are attempting to combine gamification and payments in creative ways. And today, one such company, Play2Pay, has raised $13 million in a Series A round of funding.

The Fort Lauderdale, Florida-based startup has a straightforward mission. It wants to give consumers a way to reduce their bills — it claims by an average of 30%! — by playing games, watching videos and completing daily challenges, offers and surveys.

Play2Pay was bootstrapped for the first five years of its life, raising its first external capital in June of 2020 — a $7.5 million seed round from individual angel investors. Telesoft Partners led its Series A round, which included participation from Harbor Spring Capital and individual investors including former AT&T vice chairman Ralph de la Vega, former Reuters CEO Tom Glocer, Madison Dearborn Partners co-founder and senior advisor Jim Perry and Virtusa founder and former CEO, Kris Canekeratne.

The alternative payment platform says it brokers a “value exchange” between brands and consumers, converting attention and engagement into a currency, which can be redeemed for bill payment. Meanwhile, brands get a new way to promote their products and services.

Play2Pay founder and CEO Brian Boroff started the company in 2015 based on a vision that prepaid mobile phone users should have an alternative way to pay for their mobile phone service and that wireless carriers would adopt an ad-funded commercial model.

Today, the company claims to be positioned to be the world’s first “ad supported payment rail” directly integrated into payments platforms of major service providers and financial institutions. It also claims to be the only company that converts user engagement directly into bill payment.

Image Credits: Play2Pay

The “opt-in” offering is currently available to more than 100 million mobile subscribers across the United States, United Kingdom, Mexico, Brazil and Indonesia through partnerships with telecom companies such as AT&T Mexico, Cricket in the U.S., TIM in Brazil, lndosat Ooredoo in Indonesia and U.K.-based Lycamobile.

The rewarding approach seems to be resonating with users. From June 2020 to June 2021, the startup saw its ARR (annual recurring revenue) spike by nearly 300%, according to Boroff, a telecom veteran.

Among the users engaged on the platform, about 25% generated revenue daily, he said. And service providers realized up to 17% revenue expansion as a result of subscriber engagement on the Play2Pay platform, according to Boroff.

“Our distribution model is B2B2C, with Tier-1 service providers worldwide directly integrating our bill payment capability. We’re growing our audience through promotion of the service to their customer base,” he told TechCrunch. 

End users, he added, can share their targeting preferences in exchange for value, giving mobile app developers and brands more information when promoting their own products and services to Play2Pay’s audience.

The platform is free for service providers and merchants, meaning the payment does not have costs or fees from interchange, acquirers, chargebacks or gateways.

Instead, Play2Pay generates revenue from mobile app developers and brands. Those developers and brands pay to access Play2Pay’s mobile audience in order to promote their products and services. For example, a mobile gaming company might pay Play2Pay $100 for every user that downloads their app from the Play2Pay app and plays the game for a period of time (such as two hours). Through its technology and partner network, Play2Pay has attribution tracking to ensure that the end user and mobile gaming company both know how much progress has been made toward completing that goal. Other formats include watching videos, completing surveys and more conventional native advertising in some areas.

Leap, a platform for people over 55 to learn via social interaction, has raised $3.1M funding in a seed round led by European early-stage investor Creandum, and SF-based South Park Commons. Also participating was Learn Start/Learn Capital, alongside angels Michelle Kennedy (Peanut founder), Sahil Lavingia, and Tim Tuttle.

Leap members gather online to collectively “learn, connect and grow together,” says the company, via small online groups built around shared interests. Users connect over audio and video, in groups of between five and ten. The current beta features conversations and classes hosted by specially recruited members.

Leap was founded by Swedish entrepreneur Caroline Ingeborn, former CEO of Toca Boca, a Swedish app development studio that builds learning apps for kids, and Vishal Kapur, former CTO and co-founder of Screenhero, which was acquired by Slack in 2015. The two founders met through South Park Commons, an intentional learning community that practices many of the concepts applied in Leap.


In a statement, Caroline Ingeborn said: “When I looked at other online offerings created for this demographic, I didn’t feel that they particularly encouraged meaningful connections. Groups described as ‘small’ were often bursting at the seams, and experiences often felt flimsy and random. In most instances, it felt like we were all just alone, together. It motivated me to create something far more tailored and intimate.”

Fredrik Cassel, General Partner at Creandum: “Leap is targeting an interesting segment of society: retirees – the wealthiest and fastest-growing demographic who have been largely overlooked by tech developers. It is a generation of people with considerable time, energy, and spending power that have smartphones at their fingertips. The diverse founding team convinced us with their determination and unique experiences to build a product that is truly engaging.”

Influencer marketing is one of the fastest-growing and one of the most impactful media channels today. There’s a growing ad-blocking movement and key demographics are spending less time in front of TVs.

Marketers have now realized that their customers trust the recommendations of people they relate with. However, despite this being an impactful channel, brand teams globally face a major dilemma: determining the ROI of influencer marketing campaigns.

AIfluence is a two-year-old startup with an AI-driven influencer marketing approach to measuring these campaigns. Today, the company is announcing that it has raised $1 million in seed investment led by Dubai-based EQ2 Ventures. Other investors include Antler East Africa, Oui Capital, ArabyAds, and an unnamed European family office.

AIfluence was founded by Nelson Aseka, George Issaias, Lamusia Anzaya, and Ankit Jindal in 2019. Placing AI at the core of the product, the founders started AIfluence to accurately match influencers to brands, run end to end influencer marketing campaigns, and bring transparency to the measurement of impact (ROI)

According to CEO Aseka, AIfluence is developed for an audience-first approach. It identifies and gains deep insights into a target audience and works backwards to identify influencers that impact this target audience. The platform is built on a trust network model where it deploys thousands of nano influencers and followers who have a natural affinity to a brand and exhibit a high emotional connection with the target audience.

“We are at the cusp of a revolution. Globally the way marketing works is changing. We find ourselves at an intersection of advanced technology and the fastest-growing region in the world in terms of digital and social media penetration. It’s an exciting place to be. Africa’s rich tradition for storytelling is alive and kicking,” Aseka said in a statement. “We simply enable such stories to be shared between peers who know and trust each other, and can place our brand messages into the heart of this communication ecosystem.”

The platform was launched out of company builder and VC firm Antler East Africa in late 2019 as one of its first cohorts before officially going live in April 2020. Antler is known for bringing together professionals with, on average, 10 years of experience in their respective industries to start companies. That is the case with AIfluence, where its C-level executives have varying experiences in influencer marketing, growing brands, and consumer tech products.

AIfluence is the first startup from the builder to have raised up to $1 million. “We‌ ‌are‌ ‌excited‌ ‌to‌ ‌see‌ ‌local‌ ‌founders‌ ‌with‌ ‌deep‌ ‌expertise‌ ‌in‌ ‌the‌ ‌African‌ ‌market‌ ‌take‌ ‌a‌ ‌global‌ ‌problem‌ ‌head-on,‌ ‌and‌ ‌in‌ ‌a‌ ‌short‌ ‌time‌ ‌demonstrate‌ ‌a‌ ‌tech‌ ‌solution‌ ‌that‌ ‌is‌ ‌fast‌ ‌attracting‌ ‌demand‌ ‌in‌ ‌Africa‌ ‌and‌ ‌beyond,”‌  Antler‌ ‌East‌ ‌Africa’s‌ ‌partner‌ Melalite‌ ‌Ayenew ‌said in a statement.

Talking about tackling a global problem, AIfluence says it is currently running campaigns for clients across 13 countries in African and Asia. These clients are regional and global advertisers that span across FMCG, banking, travel and electronics sectors. Aseka says Alfluence has closed over $1 million in contracts from these clients.

AIfluence makes money by running brand campaigns that drive awareness of products and services, and lead generation and conversion campaigns that drive sales. The company is currently working on a SaaS offering it says will “lace the power of the platform in the hands of its customers.”

A major challenge the company has had, Aseka describes, is identifying robust payments solutions to cater to its thousands of influencers across different regions. However, it is in the past now. “Fortunately, we have so far been able to solve this by identifying a reliable payment partner, who we will grow with as we expand across new markets,” he said.

These markets include the rest of Africa, the Middle East and Asia. With the recently raised investment, AIfluence plans to launch into these markets by the end of the year and invest in its tech and SaaS platform.

“People are the new media in today’s digital world, and AIfluence is uniquely positioned to turn this reality into tangible results for advertisers. We’ve been impressed by the team’s obsession to use data in order to spread authentic and relevant messages to the right audience. This is what advertising should always be. We’re looking forward to AIfluence’s journey ahead,”  CEO of EQ2 Ventures Patrick Thiriet CEO said in a statement.

The global social market is rapidly growing. With over 1.25 million online social sellers in Egypt alone, the Egyptian social e-commerce market is forecast to be worth more than $14.8 billion by 2024.

One of its players, Taager, is a social e-commerce platform enabling online merchants with end-to-end logistics. Today, it is announcing that it has secured $6.4 million in seed funding. 

The seed round was led by Pan-African focused VC 4DX Ventures. It also included participation from Raed Ventures, Beco Capital, Breyer Capital and some private investors, including Magnus Olsson, co-founder of Careem. This is Breyer Capital’s first investment in the MENA region, and the round brings Taager’s total investment to more than $7 million since launching in December 2019.

Social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram and more recently TikTok have made advertising easier for online merchants to target customers with their products. Offline, there’s a wide range of last-mile companies to distribute these products. However, there is a fragmentation between these processes for new merchants. They are left to fend for themselves when starting out and during the delivery of products; a perfectly executed end-to-end cycle, if you will.

“Consider I’m an undergraduate, and I want to own my own e-commerce store. Where do I get the product from? How do I ship them, where do I store them? Where do I make the fulfilment, what about financing it, how am I going to deliver it?” CEO Mohammed Elhorishy said to TechCrunch concerning the dilemma new merchants face.

Elhorishy argues that typically a merchant would need to meet different suppliers to strike deals before proceeding to do the same with shipping and last-mile delivery companies.

“With Taager, we can now see the trend of people who would never have been able to build businesses on their own, now using Taager and getting the exact outcome of the very painful processing they would have gone through if they went about it manually,” he added.

So how does this work exactly? Essentially, Taager has built a B2B platform to provide a one-stop shop for these online merchants and suppliers. The platform provides online merchants and suppliers with a suite of backend and integrated services, from operational and logistical infrastructure such as storage and shipping to an online marketplace to host their products, connecting sellers with wholesalers.

Taager Team

The company claims to use AI and data science to enable first-time sellers to start and scale their online business with relatively low risk. It offers a transparent pricing structure and an enhanced product selection process, freeing online sellers to focus on running their business while Taager handles end-to-end operations. 

After getting products from suppliers on Taager, merchants can take pictures and descriptions to Facebook (via ads or its Marketplace platform), TikTok or Instagram.

“They start utilising their marketing skills. They do advertising, run campaigns, and once an order is fulfilled, the merchants will put it on our site and Taager fulfils the end-to-end cycle. This way, merchants, without any inventory or stock or cash, can start a business and scale it from one order to a thousand orders per day because Taager made it seamless for them,” said the CEO.

On the other end, Taager takes a margin of every sale and aggregates data points. The platform does this to suggest the products that often sell to merchants and what pricing is best.

Elhorishy explains the need to employ this strategy. According to him, while Taager is not involved with the day-to-day sale of merchant’s products, the data it provides will act as growth engines alongside the heavy lifting performed by providing warehousing and last-mile services.

“It’s all about phases. You need to reach specific data-critical points where you can suggest products that make sense to the merchants. We perceive ourselves mainly as a technology and data company that has the necessary presence on the ground to fulfil this. We’re trying to automate operations as much as possible.”

Presently, Taager claims to have 5,000 merchants on its platform, critical components to the 40% month-on-month increase in Gross Merchandise Value (GMV) Elhorishy says the startup enjoys. While he did not comment on the platform’s number of suppliers, he talks about how difficult it was to onboard them initially. These suppliers, currently in their hundreds, have a plethora of options to sell their products, so Taager’s catch was to provide them with better pricing and thousands of merchants, meaning their products get sold faster. In addition to this was insights on how to expand their products and make faster imports.

“Now they come to us asking what we think the market needs, whereas it was a very big challenge in the beginning because they weren’t used to this kind of business. Another challenge was managing the last-mile operations, and now we have teams managing relationships with a wide variety of last-mile companies,” Elhorishy said of some challenges faced by the company early on.

A high margin business, as Elhorishy claims, Taager will be looking to deploy the new capital into its rapidly growing operations. It is also making hires across all levels in the company and plans to scale across MENA.

Social e-commerce globally is on the rise, and in MENA as well. Jim Breyer of Breyer Capital is enthused by this growth and Taager’s traction in the space. He believes there’s a great opportunity for Taager to replicate its unique data-driven approach for further growth across the region.

Taager’s growth also proved decisive in getting a check from its lead investor. Peter Orth, co-founder and managing partner at 4DX Ventures, said, “The Taager team have achieved very impressive results incredibly quickly, and also built one of the most impressive teams in the ecosystem. Their focus on quality and execution and a very unique approach to empowering e-commerce entrepreneurs is a dominant combination. We’re thrilled to partner with the team in the next phase of the company’s growth.”

The exoskeleton/exosuit category has been heating up over the past few years. It makes sense, really. There are two giant — and dramatically different — potential customer bases. On one end are those sorts of jobs that could benefit from some wearable assistance. On the other are people with mobility issues for whom such technology might go a long way.

Founded last year by a team spun out of Conor Walsh‘s lab at Harvard’s Wyss Institute and the John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Verve Motion is targeting the former for now. You probably don’t need a bunch of stats to realize that labor-intensive work often ends in injury, but here are a trio from the startup’s site anyway:

• One million back injuries occur in U.S. workplaces each year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics
• 260+ million work days are lost every year due to back injury, according to the United States Bone and Joint Initiative
• $14 billion in direct costs hit U.S. employers annually, according to Liberty Mutual Workplace Index 2018

Image Credits: ADUSA Distribution

If you can’t appeal to people’s sense of common decency, then at least you can appeal to their wallets. Whichever the case, Verve Motion is announcing some fresh funding, following both a seed round and a successful pilot with ADUSA (Ahold Delhaize), a large grocery distribution firm. That funding arrived during the pandemic, when many essential workers in the food supply chain were being pushed to their physical limits on a daily basis.

This time out, the firm has raised a $15 million Series A, led by Construct Capital and featuring a bunch of existing investors, like Founder Collective, Pillar VC, Safar Partners and OUP.

“This new round of funding will fuel the continued development of our solution and scale operations to meet the growing demand for our product in order to get it to the workers who need it most right now,” co-founder and CEO Ignacio Galiana said in a release. “We are grateful for the support of this exceptional group of new and existing investors, and are thrilled to welcome Construct Capital as we create solutions for the industrial workforce of the future.”

Verve’s first product is the SafeLift, a fabric-based soft exosuit capable of adapting to its wearer’s movements and reducing up to 30 to 40% of back strain.

A new $7.9 million seed round boosts Butlr Technologies’ ability to apply its real-time people-sensing technology beyond commercial real estate and retail uses to monitor falls and other movements for active seniors who are aging in place.

Hyperplane led the round, with Founder Collective, Union Labs, 500 Startups, SOSV, E14 Fund, Tectonic Ventures, Scott Belsky, Chad Laurans and Sunny Vu participating.

The new funding comes one year after the Burlingame, California-based proptech company raised $1.2 million in convertible notes, which is included in the $7.9 million. It is developing a platform and Heatic sensors that detect someone’s body heat anonymously to determine occupancy, headcount and activity.

Co-founders Honghao Deng and Jiani Zeng, who spun Butlr out of the MIT Media Lab in 2019, refer to their technology as “Alexa for spatial.” Their wireless sensors capture five frames per second of thermal body heat data — posture, quality of sleep and temperature — and then turn that into insights that customers can use to make decisions on anything from constructing a building to planning how people will coexist in physician spaces.

Deng told TechCrunch the company is “the only one combining accuracy with wireless.” The wireless aspect of the sensors, which can fit in the palm of your hand, means that they can be placed anywhere, require a one-time setup and the batteries last for two years. Butlr is also all about protecting privacy, so the replay doesn’t show faces, but instead the person’s “heat” moving around.

“The sensors can be used in any environment,” Deng said. “It should be invisible and not something people have to worry about. We can bring dignity back to the technology world, while also understanding users’ needs. This is about new things people couldn’t do before, how to use the space in real-time and in a way that is easy to deploy.”

Basic kits, which start at $880, can be purchased from the company’s website, and include space-designing software that someone can use to easily determine where to place the sensors for maximum coverage.

Butlr Technologies’ simulation of movement and detection. Image Credits: Butlr Technologies

The funding is earmarked for continued market expansion and technology development, including a more advanced API, to meet explosive demand for spatial intelligence — the company is shipping out hundreds of thousands of sensors and grew almost 10 times in revenue last year. Deng expects that to continue as companies figure out their return-to-work policies following the COVID-19 pandemic.

Though Butlr initially started with real estate and retailers, Deng sees potential in other use cases, like car traffic flow and assisted living facilities, where early diagnostics and cognitive function can be monitored before an accident happens.

“The assisted living market is huge,” Deng added. “One of the most important things coming from monitoring is understanding where a person is. We can get early predictions about their frailty.”

For example, by being able to transmit images in real time, Butlr is better able to detect rigid movements or behavior that looks like falling. This is unlike incumbent technology, which Deng said “misses minutes” during the transmission of the images.

Incumbents are also relying on wearables or health bands, which have to be charged and can be cumbersome to use in a senior care or home health environment. In addition, by having a sensor versus a camera, it also preserves dignity, Zeng said.

Founder Collective partner Eric Paley told TechCrunch that he loved what Butlr is doing because of its “incredible simplicity,” what he called “the holy grail of indoor sensing.”

He’s seen other startups go after this same market and fail due to making it difficult for an average user to set it up or require an electrician. For the sensors to be fixed in one place and be there for years “is huge,” Paley said.

“What they have been able to do at an early stage is impressive,” he added. “There are so many uses for what Butlr’s technology is doing, and many industries are coming after them to use it. We are constantly having conversations on what are the best opportunities, and by having an API approach we can serve lots of customers.”

Indian startup Inshorts that operates an eponymous news aggregator service and location-based social media platform Public has raised $60 million in a new financing round, the startup confirmed to TechCrunch on Thursday.

Vy Capital led the new round in Inshorts, which has raised $140 million in the last one year. The new investment values the startup at about $550 million, up from about $250 million in March this year and $125 million in September last year, according to three people familiar with the matter.

Azhar Iqubal, co-founder and chief executive of Inshorts, confirmed the size of the round and lead investor but declined to comment on the valuation. The startup counts Addition, Tiger Global, SIG, A91 and Tanglin Venture Partners among its investors.

“The world is changing every minute, and each one of us has an inherent desire to remain updated about these changes. Both Inshorts app and Public app are aimed to help some of these people in their quest of keeping themselves informed and we are thrilled to have Vy Capital join us in our journey,” he said in a brief statement.

Launched last year, Public app has emerged as one of the most popular social apps in the South Asian country. The location-based social network connects individuals to people in their vicinity. Think about people living in the same society, or people in a mall or within a few miles from each other.

The app, which is available in several major Indian languages (including Hindi, Bengali, Punjabi, Telugu, Tamil, Kannada, Malayalam, Odia, Assamese, Gujarati and Marathi), allows shop owners to drive e-commerce, and also serves as a classified, entertainment and recruiting platform.

“We are excited to partner with Azhar and team in their journey to build one of the largest content platforms out of India, running two market leading properties with a rapidly growing user base. We look forward to working closely with the company and the team as it enters the next phase of scaling,” said Vamsi Duvvuri, Partner, Vy Capital, in a statement.

This is a developing story. More to follow…