Author: azeeadmin

First created to give supply chain merchants a streamlined way to communicate with buyers, Tinvio is now preparing to launch financial services, including financing and credit card issuing. The Singapore-based startup announced today it has raised a $12 million Series A to build out its B2B transactions platform. The round was led by AppWorks Ventures, with participation from strategic investor MUFG Innovation Partners (MUIP), a venture capital firm for collaborations between startups and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group.

All of Tinvio’s existing investors—Sequoia Capital India’s Surge, Global Founders Capital and Partech Ventures—also returned for its Series A, which brings Tinvio’s total raised to $18.5 million.

Tinvio’s last funding announcement was a $5.5 million seed round in April 2020. The company was founded in July 2019 by Ajay Gopal, whose prior professional experience included leading initial public offering and merger and acquisition transactions as a fintech investment banker for Credit Suisse in London.

Since its seed funding, Tinvio says its client base has increased four times to over 5,000 businesses in Singapore, Indonesia, Thailand and other Asian markets. Gopal told TechCrunch that as its user base grows, it is acquiring more new customers through word-of-mouth and referrals. For example, Southeast Asian F&B supplier QQ Group onboarded all of its merchants onto Tinvio and now uses the platform for all trade orders.

One of the reasons Tinvio focuses on F&B businesses is because they deal with a lot of perishable goods and constantly need to manage orders and inventory. Gopal said the company also has clients in the healthcare and automotive sectors, but plans to keep targeting growth in F&B.

Tinvio app was originally launched as a way to consolidate orders from different places, including email, SMS and WhatsApp, and let suppliers keep real-time digital ledgers.

It recently entered financial services by adding a digital payments collection and reconciliation features. Gopal says many suppliers still take payment in the form of bank transfers or cash and paper checks on delivery, making it difficult to keep manage their cash cycles. So Tinvio launched a “super dirty pilot” for on-platform payments late last year in Indonesia, and after validating it, added B2B payments to its core product. Tinvio supports payments through credit cards, direct debits and automated bank transfers, and is integrated with regional payment gateways. Over the last two months, 95% of suppliers on the platform have continued to use Tinvio to collect payments from their merchants.

“It’s only been live for a couple of months, but we’ve already gotten so much feedback from our users and we’re sprinting to unlock new capabilities such as real-time payments and credit,” said Gopal.

The company has a 12-month roadmap for its other financial services, including transaction financing, credit card issuing and invoice factoring, with pilots planned for the next two quarters. “In this Series A, we’ve teamed up with MUFG bank,” Gopal said. “This sets us up in a fantastic position to go-to-market even sooner with our financial technology stack that we’ve been building.”

In a statement, AppWorks Ventures managing partner Jessica Liu said, “Tinvio’s focus on modernizing B2B trade with a seamless user experience has seen it onboard and digitalize thousands of merchant and supplier teams without disrupting their daily routines or procurement workflows. Despite COVID-19, we still see great growth momentum, led by increasing network effects, leaving Tinvio well positioned to dominate this category.”

 

Easy Eat AI, a Singapore-based startup that wants to “transform restaurants into technology companies,” announced today it has raised $5 million in funding. Easy Eat AI offers an operating system for restaurants that lets them digitize all parts of their business, from inventory and customer orders to delivery, and gain AI-based data analytics to improve revenue.

Many food and beverage businesses started digitizing orders and payments so they could offer deliveries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though Easy Eat AI lets restaurants integrate with third-party food ordering apps, it also has its own delivery infrastructure, including on-demand riders, that costs just 4% per order, compared to the 20%-30% that many of the largest food delivery platforms charge.

Founded in 2019 by Mohd Wassem, Rhythm Gupta and Abdul Khalid, Easy Eat AI currently has operations in Malaysia, and plans to expand into other Southeast Asian markets. The funding included participation from Aroa Ventures, the family office of OYO founder Ritesh Agarwal; Reddy Futures Family Office; Prophetic Ventures; OYO global chief strategy officer Maninder Gulati; Alarko Ventures managing partner Cem Garih; and Esas Ventures founder and managing partner Fethi Sabancı Kamışlı.

Wassem told TechCrunch that Easy Eat AI was created because even though Southeast Asia “is a food paradise, everyone eats out, eating out is a culture here,” the restaurant industry is still one of the least advanced digitally. Before the pandemic, he said that about 80% of restaurant business came from in-person dining, but taking orders manually resulted in very little data kept about who customers are, what they like to order or how often they return.

Easy Eat AI’s platform helps restaurants create that digital connection with their customers. Some of its clients include chains like Richiamo Coffee, Mr. Fish Fishhead Noodles, WTF Group and Hailam Toast. During COVID-19 lockdowns, Easy Eat AI has helped restaurants fulfill deliveries and its other features, like targeted marketing campaigns and loyalty reward programs, are relevant to in-person dining, too.

Easy Eat AI’s consumer interface is based on QR code ordering—customers scan the code with their smartphone and are taken directly to the restaurant’s menu online. They pick what they want, then create an account or sign-in by entering their mobile number. Payments and reward programs can also be accessed through the platform.

The company says that after analyzing 100,000 orders at more than 50 restaurants over six months, it found that people spend about 30% more when they order digitally compared to through a waiter—similar to when people go shopping for a specific item online and end up adding more items to their cart while browsing.

After a restaurant uses Easy Eat AI for about 30 to 45 days, it is able to build a customer database for targeted online marketing strategies, sending offers to the people who are most likely to use them.

For example, a month after launching in its third outlet of Mr. Fish, the platform had collected data from more than 1,400 customers. The restaurant was able to see that about 20% visited the restaurant more than once, and the average duration between their visits was 12 days. Based on that information, it created marketing campaigns to draw back people who hadn’t returned in 20 days. During that time, Mr. Fish also started fulfilling delivery orders through Easy Eat AI, and by the end of the month, 13.4% of its orders were coming through the platform, reducing its reliance on third-party delivery apps.

In a statement about the funding, Keshav Reddy, managing partner of Reddy Futures Family Office, said, “The team is customer obsessed and understands the pain problems of the industry. Their innovative software platform will be disruptive to the entire F&B ecosystem and how customers engage through the entire F&B lifecycle in the online-to-offline world.”

Part of Y Combinator’s current batch, Deskimo wants to make finding coworking spaces easier. Its on-demand booking app is currently available in Singapore and Hong Kong, with plans to enter more markets after Demo Day. Its founders are former Rocket Internet executives who say that their main competition aren’t spaces like WeWork or other hot desk booking apps. Instead, its Starbucks, since Deskimo caters to people who usually work from home, but occasionally need a place nearby where they can get away from distractions or take meetings. Deskimo partners with employers and charges them by the minutes their workers spend at space, instead of a monthly or yearly fee.

Deskimo was launched in February by Raphael Cohen, Rocket Internet’s former head of Asia, and Christian Mischler, who co-founded Foodpanda and served as its global chief operating officer. After Rocket Internet, the two started HotelQuickly, an on-demand booking app they sold in 2017.

The pandemic has quickly changed attitudes toward remote work, with a McKinsey survey finding that 62% of respondents said they only wanted to return to the office a few days a week, or not at all. As a result, many companies, especially startups, will continue offering flexible arrangements.

Mischler and Cohen already have experience watching peoples’ behavior shift after Foodpanda was launched. “Back in 2012, people were saying that food ordering is not going to work online, people just order on the home or in person,” Cohen said. “What we learned from on-demand restaurant delivery, the shared market-based model, is very similar in that case to setting up with workspace partners.”

 

Deskimo now has about 40 properties in Singapore and 25 in Hong Kong, and wants to expand in both residential and business districts, since many remote workers prefer to find a space close to their homes. It works with several different types of property owners and is approaching each group step-by-step. The first are office spaces that are already set up for coworking and see Deskimo as an additional distribution channel. The second are hotels that are converting some of their space into coworking areas. Finally, Deskimo plans to partner with spaces like social clubs and event venues that usually sit empty during weekdays.

On the client side, Deskimo contracts with companies, who then offer the app to their employees. Each person gets a monthly budget on Deskimo, and their employers are only billed for the time they spend at a space. The Deskimo app generates a QR code that workers use to gain access to one of its spaces, and they also scan it when checking out to record how long they were there. Pricing ranges from about $2 to $4 USD per minute, with desks in central business districts typically costing more. Aggregated invoices are sent to clients each month and revenue is then shared with coworking space owners.

“Many companies realize they can save a lot of costs by having people work from home so they can reduce their office space, and instead of adding more fixed costs, they just add variable costs,” said Mischler. “They provide their employees with the ability to go to an office, but if they don’t want to because they have a great home to work from, employees are also more than welcome to work from home.”

In Deskimo’s current markets, other on-demand coworking space apps include Switch, Flydesk, WorkBuddy and Booqed. But Mischler says its main competitors are large F&B chains like Starbucks, since they are easy to find. He adds that Deskimo is more efficient for workers, who are guaranteed a table and don’t need to worry about finding outlets or the quality of Wi-Fi. Besides expanding into more markets, Deskimo also wants to add other services on top of coworking to give it a competitive edge.

“Once we have the company relationships and their employees use Deskimo for their bookings, there’s a lot of different things we can build on top of it, whether it’s employee engagement or workforce management, not just workplace management,” says Mischer. “But we’re focused on the transactional model right now because that’s the biggest pain point.”

 

Chevrolet Bolts are back in the news – this time for another consumer alert issued by the National Highway Traffic and Safety Administration, less than a year after the agency issued a recall for a similar issue.

NHTSA is recommending owners of Model Year 2017-2019 park their Bolts away from homes due to the risk of fire. Those are the same vehicles that were recalled in November 2020, due to the possibility of fire from the battery pack underneath the backseat’s cushion. The recall affected 50,932 2017-2019 Chevy Bolt vehicles.

But this recall seems to have been triggered by two recent fire incidents in vehicles that were supposedly remedied as part of that previous safety recall, General Motors said on its website.

“Out of an abundance of caution, we are asking owners of 2017-2019 Chevrolet Bolt EVs who were part of the recall population to park their vehicles outdoors immediately after charging and not leave their vehicles charging overnight while we investigate these incidents.”

GM says it has potentially identified a remedy to the battery anomalies, which customers can access by visiting a participating Bolt dealer. Customers of 2019 Bolts were able to access this remedy from April 29, and owners of 2017 and 2018 Bolts were eligible from May 26. The diagnostic software GM used to identify the anomalies will be standard in 2022 Bolts, and other future GM vehicles, the automaker said.

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for July 14, 2021. We have a jam-packed newsletter for you today, so we’re getting something out of the way up top. We’ve covered India’s technology regulatory market often in recent weeks. Why? Because the Indian startup scene is crazy busy. How India’s government handles the boom is going to be critical for a host of founders, investors and workers.

In that vein, the latest chapter in the story involves Mastercard, which just got blocked from onboarding new users. Why? Per our reporting, “noncompliance with local data storage rules.” Data rules, you will recall, are a big part of the changing regulatory world for Chinese startups as well. Something to keep an eye on! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

Today’s Top 3 are all about social networks. Yes, the massive companies that we share our lives with, day in and day out. Let’s start with Facebook.

• Facebook, like Amazon, is not thrilled with the new U.S. antitrust boss: Lina Khan’s appointment as the head of the U.S. Federal Trade Commission (FTC) is causing waves among the largest tech companies in the world. Amazon demanded that she recuse herself from regulating its business. Facebook is now making similar noises. In short, the tech giants think that her prior criticism of their business practices is disqualifying. This is at once risible and notable; that a regulator has a perspective about, well, regulation seems more like a qualification than a disqualifying fact.
• Facebook is also willing to buy creator love: Sticking to the Facebook world for a moment, the company announced a $1 billion fund that will be paid out to digital creators who produce work that lives on its platforms. The dollar amount is what we should pay attention to here; Facebook is willing to pay up for the sort of attention that TikTok has managed to accrue for free.
• Twitter is killing Fleets: The final bit of Hot New Social Media News is that Twitter is killing off its little-loved stories feature called Fleets. First, read the TechCrunch story, then enjoy this fine tweet and this utterly perfect subheadline.

Really though, are you going to miss Fleets? No.

Startups/VC

We have a lot to get into from the startup world today, starting with two pieces looking at the subject from a more meta level. Then we have a grip of neat new rounds for your enjoyment:

• How to make today’s high-flying startup valuations work: I wrote this earlier today to distill some conversations I’ve had with investors and founders about today’s startup valuations, and how the high prices being paid may work out for both founders and venture capitalists. They may not! But here’s a bullish take.
• Billions for battery tech: LG Chem is planning on spending some $5.2 billion on battery tech in the next four years. That’s more than $1 billion per year. This move details just how hot this sector is. Hell, it’s even minting SPACs for companies with revenue still years in the future.
• a16z not done investing in crypto: That’s the news today, with the venture firm leading a $9 million Series A into Phantom, which Lucas describes as a “crypto wallet startup.” Recall that a16z has reloaded its venture cannon with fresh crypto-focused funds.
• $21M for virtual concerts: One nice thing about the pandemic was musical acts putting on neat virtual shows. Here’s an example. Now FlyMachine has lots of money to “capture some of the magic of live concerts and performances in a livestreamed setting.” Yes, please — that sounds amazing.
• More money for cybersecurity: Life has three absolutes: death, taxes and huge new cybersecurity rounds. Today’s is a $275 million Series F for Cybereason, which works in the extended detection and response (XDR) space.
• Meet the newest Midwest unicorn: It’s M1 Finance, a startup that TechCrunch has covered extensively in the last year. Why? Because the company built a finance superapp that has proven very attractive to users. The company now has $150 million more under its belt — the new funds come just four months after it raised $75 million! — and $4.5 billion in assets under management.
• Finally, more money for fake meat: Raising animals is a pretty inefficient way to generate calories for consumption, and it’s hell on the environment. That’s why investors are pouring capital into fake meat companies. Next Gen Foods announced today that it has raised a $20 million seed extension (yep) for its “plant-based chicken alternative,” TechCrunch reports.

How to navigate an acquisition without alienating your current employees

Now that COVID-19 vaccines are encouraging the world to reopen, two trends are underway:

In the first half of 2021, mergers and acquisitions increased by more than 150% YOY to $2.4 trillion; in several surveys, an overwhelming majority of workers said they intend to seek employment elsewhere.

If your startup is angling toward an exit, the promise of a big payday may not be enough to retain employees who feel burned out or dissatisfied.

Many founders don’t have prior management experience, and, frankly, the uncertainty associated with an exit makes it a poor time for on-the-job learning. With that in mind, here are several communication strategies that can help you keep your winning team intact.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Big Tech Inc.

Sure, we covered a lot of Big Tech news up top, but there’s even more to get to:

• Remember Kindle? Amazon has put together a new Kindle service to allow for serialized fiction. Which is super cool. Even better, the service is now live. It’s called Kindle Vella. Anything that gives authors more creative room is good by me.
• Twilio wants to help you add audio, video to your app: API-delivered service trendsetter Twilio has announced Twilio Live, a service that will help developers embed live audio and video into their apps. Details are a bit scarce so far, but there are startups working on related products, so it will be interesting to see how this market shares out.
• Microsoft built cloud Windows while no one was looking: Redmond has a new service out called Windows 365 — which is not Microsoft 365, the rebrand of its Office 365 service. Windows 365 will allow companies to stream Windows to devices. Frederic reports that “Windows 365 has been long expected and is really just an evolution of existing remote desktop services.” We still think it’s neat, however.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

Are you all caught up on last week’s coverage of growth marketing? If not, read it here.

As usual, if you have a recommendation of a growth marketer we should know about, fill out the survey here.

Read one of the testimonials we received below!

Marketer: Mitch Causey, Demandwell

Recommended by: Drew Beechler, High Alpha

Testimonial: “Mitch and the Demandwell team are some of the smartest content, SEO and digital marketers I’ve ever met, and their results speak for themselves. Their process, proprietary software and expertise around organic search and content is some of the best out there in helping companies think about organic search as a repeatable, proven method for growth and demand gen. Mitch and the Demandwell playbook worked so well that after being a client for two years and recommending to many in our portfolio, High Alpha ended up bringing Demandwell into the portfolio to turn their playbook into a scalable software platform.”

Pitching is perhaps the single most important skill that any founder needs to hone, so not surprisingly, we kicked off our TechCrunch Early Stage 2021 — Marketing & Fundraising event with a deep dive on all the tips and tricks required to get the most out of pitching and slide decks. On hand was Adina Tecklu, a principal at Khosla Ventures, and who formerly built out Canaan Beta, the consumer seed practice at Canaan Partners.

We talked about the importance of knowing your customer (aka your potential investor), focusing on story, typical slides in a deck, the appendix slides, formatting, and then alternative formats and which to avoid in a pitch deck.

Help TechCrunch find the best growth marketers for startups.

Provide a recommendation in this quick survey and we’ll share the results with everybody.

Know your customer, in this case, your investor

We kicked off our discussion with advice that remains as valuable as it is obvious. Even today, despite the wealth of resources available on the internet to background research potential investors, founders regularly walk into their pitch meetings like deer in headlights with no sense of that particular investor’s interests, tastes, stage of investment and more. Don’t be that founder.

Key number one is know your audience. The best founders understand their users, whether that is an end consumer, or an enterprise customer. They’ve done the research to understand what motivates their customers, how they make buying decisions, and also what their customers like and don’t like as much about their own product. When fundraising, your VC essentially becomes your customer. And so before you begin pitching, or even building your deck, it’s really important to do your research beforehand to understand the firms and the partners that you intend to pitch. (Timestamp: 2:25)

If you do that right,

That knowledge allows you to proactively address any concerns that they might have. And really make sure that you position your business in a way that is both authentic, but in a way that will be well received by the VC. (Timestamp: 3:20)

• Six things venture capitalists are looking for in your pitch
• What to expect when pitching European VCs
• Should you pay $50K for your pitch deck? Yes, why the hell not?

Story-driven, not data-driven

Data is the most important source of wisdom in Silicon Valley, or so the belief holds. But the reality, particularly in early-stage investing, is that the data can only paint a partial picture of a startup and a founder’s ambition. Don’t let a dense copse of trees occlude the wider forest, which is what investors are really investing in.

We knew DMs were on the way to Clubhouse and today the new feature landed, spicing up the audio-only app with a text-based chat feature. Clubhouse’s new direct messaging system, called “Backchannel,” gives users an oft-requested way to start conversations behind the scenes on the social audio app.

Backchannel offers both one-on-one messaging as well as group chat and generally adds quite a bit of utility into the voice-only social network. Speakers can organize in advance or coordinate live through messaging while running a room. They can also accept text-based questions, which some listeners are probably more comfortable with.

Clubhouse users can send links but not images or videos through Backchannel for now, but it sounds like more new features just around the corner. The messaging system also includes a message request area where communication from people you don’t know lives until you approve it. So far, Clubhouse’s DMs are focused on chatting with people you know or people you’d like to know. Without a room-wide text chat option, the main action will remain firmly centered in voice-based rooms.

The messaging system is live now across Clubhouse’s iOS and Android apps. To start a DM — fine, a “Backchannel” — look for the little paper airplane icon on anybody’s profile page or swipe right from the main menu to pull it up. One thing worth noting: It doesn’t look like you can delete messages yet (though you can copy or report them!), so be sure you really mean whatever it is that you’re backchanneling about.

When Microsoft announced that it was releasing a cloud PC service called Windows 365 this morning, it got me thinking. While Windows 365 is about packaging a virtual Windows business desktop in a cloud context, if you think about the announcement in a different way, perhaps it could herald the beginning of a lightweight, cloud-based version of Windows — something that has been talked about for some time.

To be clear, the cloud PC announcement wasn’t related to hardware at all. It’s taking a Windows desktop and moving it fully virtualized to the cloud where you can run it from anywhere giving you a replica of your Windows desktop PC in the cloud. But what if you stretched that idea a bit by taking Microsoft 365 with Office apps and threw it onto a low-cost PC and used the Edge browser as your primary way of interacting with the computer? Now you have something that could compete directly with a Chromebook-style computer.

That’s exactly what Google has done with Chrome and Chromebooks for over a decade, working with partners to deliver low-cost hardware with most required compute work taking place in the cloud. The Chrome browser is the primary desktop environment, Google Workspace (aka G Suite) is the default set of office suite apps with word processor, spreadsheet and presentation software along with email and calendar and other services. In fact, you can run any software service you wish in Chrome including Microsoft’s cloud office tools. Regardless, the end-result of this is a low-end business (or personal) laptop that gets most of its power from the cloud.

Most people don’t need a modern notebook computer, and the hardware required to run full-strength operating systems contributes to the high cost of the underlying machine, something Google discovered long ago. If you simplified everything to a browser, an office suite, and web access to your favorite tools, you would have just about everything you need without all of the management headaches associated with owning a PC with a traditional OS sitting on it.

Think about the person who just uses email, office tools and watches a little Netflix. This kind of machine would be perfect for them without blowing their budget out of the water or being overly complex.

Last year when the pandemic hit and everyone had to hunker down and work on a PC including children, people went looking for a low-cost option. They voted for Chromebook in droves accounting for over 30 million units sold, including over 11 million in the fourth quarter alone, according to Canalys data.

While growth slowed a bit in the first quarter of this year, Canalys found Chromebook shipments still grew by 275%. Brian Lynch, an analyst at Canalys wrote in the report that “Chromebooks are well and truly a mainstream computing product now,” adding that “while the education sector still accounts for the majority of shipments, their popularity with consumers and traditional commercial customers has reached new heights over the course of the last year.”

Windows did well too, but given the number of Chromebooks flying off the shelves — led by Lenovo and HP, two companies that also make machines running Microsoft software — a Windows-based cloud PC could give Chromebook a run for its money.

It’s worth noting that, yes, there are low-cost Windows PCs out there. You can get one at Walmart for $149, which competes price-wise with any Chromebook computer out there, but these lower end Windows machines are still a full-fledged Windows PC and you still have to deal with all the management. From an IT (or personal use) perspective, Chromebooks are much easier to manage than Windows PCs.

Since Satya Nadella came on board as CEO at Microsoft in 2014, the company has shown a strong willingness to shift its focus away from the PC where it made its name (and its money) and move toward the cloud. So far, Redmond has done well moving in that direction with its market cap recently breaking the $2 trillion threshold.

What’s more, Microsoft’s cloud infrastructure market share sits at around 20%, more than doubling where it was in 2014 when Nadella took over. Even more, the company had around 16% of cloud office suite market share in 2014, a figure that has grown to 40% today. Google’s office suite is the fairest of them all though with almost 60%, according to Statista. That is due at least in part to its Chromebook sales pushing users towards its suite.

If Microsoft wants to dent that number, a good way to do that would be to create a cloud-based notebook that looks a lot like Chromebook, but with a Windows bent. It would mean eating into their traditional desktop PC OS dominance, but much like in 2014, it could be about trading a past with diminishing returns for a future with much more promising ones.

The United States has fallen behind China and Europe in the production and adoption of electric vehicles, especially from 2017 to 2020, according to a study by the International Council on Clean Transportation. One important piece of the puzzle that the U.S. does have supremacy in, however, is the production of semiconductors, which are used in everything from smartphones to computers to electric vehicles. Now, it might be strengthening that hold.

SK Siltron CSS, a unit of South Korean semiconductor wafer manufacturer, SK Siltron, announced Wednesday plans to invest $300 million and create up to 150 high-paying, skilled jobs in Bay County, Michigan, which is about a couple hours north of Detroit, the country’s first automaking haven. The wafer manufacturer already has a presence in nearby Auburn, so the new factory will more than double its employee base. Over the next three years, SK Siltron says its investment will provide manufacturing and R&D capabilities of advanced materials for electric vehicles.

SK Siltron CSS Chief Executive Jianwei Dong told Reuters, which first reported the news, the $300 million investment would “help develop a domestic EV supply chain based in Michigan because we have our end customers in nearby communities.”

This new investment comes amid an ever-increasing lineup of new electric vehicles and investments in electrification from American automakers, including legacy companies General Motors and Ford as well as Tesla and upstarts such as Rivian.

It’s also joining the sticky pot of trade wars between China and the U.S.

China has owned EV production globally, producing 44% of all vehicles made from 2010 to 2020, but the U.S. has put a strangle hold on semiconductors, consistently blocking China from acquiring other chipmakers. Strong policies that both invest in EV production and spur demand have proven successful in both China and Europe, according to the ICCT report. The Biden administration’s call for $174 billion in funding to expand EV subsidies and charging networks could help the country catch up.

“As we build toward a more sustainable future, it is important that we create new, robust supply chains in the U.S. to support our corporations and the end consumer,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina M. Raimondo in a statement. “The automotive industry has a tremendous opportunity with the rise of the electric vehicle, and we’re excited to see companies like SK Siltron CSS expanding to help support the transition to a green future.”

The SK Siltron CSS expansion still needs approval from state and local authorities, the company said, although it’s unlikely it will meet much resistance. The Michigan Economic Development Corporation said the state has been trying to attract EV-related jobs, spending nearly $9 billion in investments over the last two years and adding more than 10,000 jobs for the EV transition. SK Siltron said as it works with the state and local agencies to find employees, 70% will be skilled workers and the rest will be professional engineers.

Wafers 101

A wafer is a thin slice of semiconductor that’s used to make integrated circuits, which essentially help make semiconductor chips smaller and faster. The wafer serves as the base upon which the rest of the semiconductor is built, making it crucial ingredient to the whole process. EVs need semiconductors because they allow batteries to operate at higher voltages, drive the powertrain and support modern car features like touchscreen interactivity.

SK Siltron’s wafer is made of silicon carbide, which can handle higher powers and conduct heat better than normal silicon, the company says.

“When used in EV system components, this characteristic can allow a more efficient transfer of electricity from the battery to the motor, increasing the driving range of an EV by 5% to 10%,” the company said in a statement.

The wafers can also be used in 5G communications equipment, and Dong told Reuters that the company is also considering additional investments.

Woven Planet Holdings — an entity created by Toyota to invest in, develop and eventually bring future of transportation technologies like automated driving to market — has acquired HD mapping startup Carmera for an undisclosed amount. The announcement comes less than two months since Woven Planet Holdings acquired Lyft’s autonomous vehicle unit known as Level 5 for $550 million.

It also follows another HD mapping acquisition — Nvidia’s purchase of DeepMap — that was announced in June.

Under terms of the deal, Carmera will become a wholly owned subsidiary of Woven Planet. The startup’s 50-person team will maintain its offices in New York and Seattle and will eventually be integrated into Woven Planet’s 1,000-person-and-growing enterprise, according to Woven Planet CEO James Kuffner.

Carmera will essentially become the U.S. outpost of Woven Planet’s automated mapping platform (AMP) team, which is headquartered in Tokyo. Ro Gupta, co-founder and CEO of Carmera, will report up to Mandali Khalesi who heads up AMP.

Carmera launched in 2015 with a barter type business model that uses data collected from a service it provides for free to commercial fleet operators to maintain and expand its primary mapping product. Carmera’s main and initial product is a high-definition map developed for autonomous vehicle customers like automakers, suppliers and robotaxis. Autonomous vehicle startup Voyage, which was acquired this year by Cruise, was an early Carmera customer. Baidu also used Carmera’s technology to support the open source Apollo mapping project.

The company uses data crowdsourced from its fleet-monitoring service product to keep those AV maps fresh. The fleet product is a telematics and video monitoring service used by professional fleets that want to manage risk and improve safety with their vehicles and drivers. These fleets of camera-equipped human-driven vehicles deliver new information to the autonomous map as they go about their daily business in cities.

Carmera has evolved its product lineup over time. It added a real-time events and change-management engine to its autonomous map and created a spatial data and street analytics product for cities and urban planners. Last year, Carmera launched it’s so-called Change-as-a-Service platform, a suite of products that detects changes and can be integrated into other third-party maps.

“The problem I’ve always had with some of the HD map companies is it’s nice that you have this capability, but until you can figure out how to scale it, host it and keep it updated, you’re stuck in the ‘I-have-a-neat-piece-of-software-that-someone-is-going-to-buy-from-me role,'” Mike Ramsey, VP analyst at Gartner said. “This deal solves Carmera’s scale problem.”

While Carmera is tiny in size and capital compared to Woven Planet, those following the industry might have predicted this union.

Carmera has been working with Toyota Research Institute-Advanced Development, which was the impetus of Woven Planet, for three years. The startup first participated in a proof of concept project in Japan to develop camera-based automation of HD maps for urban and surface roads. The partnership expanded in 2020 to include mapping of roadways in Detroit and other roads in Michigan as well as in Japan.

“It was really easy to invest a lot into the relationship,” Gupta said reflecting on Carmera’s first partnership with Toyota in 2018. “The vision was just so similar; it’s almost eerie looking at our seed deck from five years ago and comparing it to what Woven Planet’s overall vision is and their vision for this automated mapping platform.”

Woven Planet (and by extension Toyota) already has satellite-based mapping and the massive amounts of data gleaned from its millions of vehicles on the road today. Carmera brings the dynamic mapping piece as well as its experience in the commercial fleets and safety business to Woven Planet’s portfolio.

“For me, there’s immediate near-term applications that we’ve already worked on as proofs-of-concept with Carmera, and that we haven’t yet announced, but are in the area of safety and automated driving,” Kuffner said, noting that the automaker’s new Lexus LS and Toyota Mirai models will offer an advanced driving assistance technology called Teammate that uses HP maps. “I’m really excited about that generation of products, but for fleets, absolutely. HD maps. There are a lot of applications in fleets.”

What Woven Planet is weaving

The Lyft and now Carmera acquisitions represent a sliver of Woven Planet’s myriad of activities since its formation in January 2021 as the automaker seeks a competitive edge against established rivals and upstarts, particularly on the software front. The entity, which is based in Tokyo and a subsidiary of Toyota Motor Corp, includes two operating companies, a VC fund called Woven Capital and Woven City, a testing ground for new technologies set in an interconnected smart city prototype. Toyota broke ground in February 2021 at future site of Woven City, the Higashi-Fuji site in Susono City, Japan, at the base of Mount Fuji.

The two operating companies are Woven Alpha and Woven Core, formerly Toyota Research Institute — Advanced Development Inc. Woven Core includes the mapping unit and is focused on automated driving while Woven Alpha is charged with developing new concepts and projects including the prototype city.

Meanwhile, Woven Capital invests in those next-generation mobility innovations. The VC arm kicked off its new $800 million strategic fund in March 2021 by announcing an investment into autonomous delivery vehicle company Nuro. Last month, Woven Capital invested an undisclosed amount into Ridecell, a transportation software startup that has developed a platform designed to help car-sharing, ride-sharing and autonomous technology companies manage their vehicles.