Author: azeeadmin

Data is king. But if there isn’t a way to capture, sort and use it, then there it sits — an untapped resource.

V2X Network, a German-based startup presenting onstage Thursday during Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin, sees opportunity in all the data produced in the modern car. And it’s a hefty sum. A fully connected and automated car loaded with sensors can produce up to 4 terabytes of data per day, the company says. As V2X Network puts it, “cars have basically become rolling data servers.”

This data can provide all kinds of insights, such as driving and road conditions and the locations of charging and fuel stations. Data produced from vehicles, if properly captured and organized, could be used to deliver services to consumers, such as helping to improve driving behavior or handing the information to city planners to better understand traffic patterns.

This isn’t a new opportunity. (After all, Intel calls data the new oil.) And V2X Network is not the first (or the last) company to see gold in the hills of data generated by connected vehicles.

V2X Network, which was founded earlier this year, is taking a carrot-first and blockchain-protected approach. The company, founded by CEO Ahsan Shamim, COO Holger Philipp and CTO Shumail Mohyuddin, has developed what it describes as a decentralized incentivized platform that gives developers access to in-vehicle data, which can be turned into a variety of different apps.

But there’s a moat, and it’s the driver. V2X Network doesn’t allow any application developer to access the data without the driver’s consent, and that can always be revoked, the company’s founders told TechCrunch. 

Here’s how the founders, who have backgrounds in automotive and computer science, envision the system will work.

Giving developers access to in-vehicle data so they can turn it into all kinds of apps delivered to cities, automakers and drivers sounds like a winning idea. The problem is accessing that data. Why would anyone just give it away? And why would automakers hand it over?

V2X Network is taking a dual approach to getting access to that valuable data. The company is collaborating with automakers for direct access. (V2X Network couldn’t say who they were working with; only that they’re starting to work with two OEMs on a proof of concept basis.) The second data source is straight from the car owner through an OBD-II dongle solution used to collect data on older vehicles. A prototype of the V2X Network dongle, a blockchain node that starts sharing information with V2X Network once it’s plugged in, was shown at Disrupt Berlin.  

Once the data is collected, it’s made available to developers who use it to create valuable apps that could be used by drivers, cities and automakers, among others.

Incentivizing the car owner for producing the data lies at the center of the platform. V2X Network isn’t buying the data from the car owner. Instead, the company proposes charging data access fees from the service providers and sharing part of the revenue with the car owners or manufacturers.

The company sees a variety of possible applications developed from the data, from fleet management services and vehicle tracking to traffic congestion control, smart parking and driver coaching.

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Startup entrepreneurs have a crucial role to play in building a more agile response to the global refugee crisis and also helping to change the narrative around displaced people, TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin has heard.

Speaking during a panel discussing how technology can support refugees to integrate and rebuild their lives, Aline Sara, CEO of NaTakallam said: “I do think that the UN and other large agencies are really looking to innovation, looking to the tech sector to kind of be able to foresee and prevent more damage.”

NaTakallam is a platform that connects people she described as “forced digital nomads” with remote language tutoring work so they can be economically active despite being displaced.

She described the current moment in history as “a moment of damage control” — not just as a consequence of refugees displaced by conflict but what’s likely to be a growing wave of climate change displacement in the coming years.

“We are in a scary time in history with some estimating there will be something like 200M refugees by 2025 due to climate change so it is something we can’t ignore,” she said, arguing that the traditional non-profit sector is not well set-up to meet the scale of the looming challenge — and that’s where tech can help.

“The humanitarian sector is broken,” she warned. “So much time is spent fund-raising rather than focusing on your work. I think that personally coming from more of the NGO background what I see in the tech sector and the startup mindset is a lot more nimbleness and a lot more practicality in the mindset, jumping in and being more free… to move and change your plans.

“So I think the startup mindset and the tech sector has a lot to offer and it would be great to really keep merging these two fields. Because the severity of the situation is so massive that we really do need innovation.”

Discussing her own startup, she continued: “What we really see is NaTakallam is serving as a stepping stone for them to pursue other opportunities and other careers which is really critical because there’s a severe risk of losing such incredible human capital due to what’s going on in these countries and these young populations who really had their futures ahead of them.

“The Syrian population was highly educated… Unfortunately the media and our political leaders aren’t being the best spokespeople for the refugees… They’re completely stuck and cut off and they’re discriminated against. They’re like us. We had one of our students who wrote to us the other day and said his Syrian language partner likes Pink Floyd. So really part of what we feel is important in the work that we do is us changing the narrative and raising awareness around who these displaced people are.”

“I would also say that technology isn’t the solution on its own. It’s always the human aspect as well,” she added.

Also speaking on the panel was Anne Kjaer Reichart, CEO and co-founder of a German startup called the ReDI School of Digital Integration — which began with the idea of helping refugees learn to code but is now opening up to support German citizens needing to upskill to get into (or back into) the labor market.

Their hope is also to help with integration.

“We will also have Germans in the course and for us that’s super positive because integration means people who are locals meeting people who are foreigners and actually talk together, work together, learn to live together,” she said. “So yes we started with teaching refugees but from now let’s get all the Germans in there as well who are also needing access to education and let’s build the tech world together.”

The school is in a handful of German cities so far but Reichart said the “long term vision is to create a social franchise to see if it could work all around the world”.

She told the story of a 24-year-old student at the school who is now studying and running two ecommerce shops.

Another startup the school has supported is trying to build an app to help navigate local bureaucracy which she also suggested could end up helping local Germans too.

Discussing how the school tailored its initial approach to support refugees she told TechCrunch moderator Mike Butcher: “We apply positive psychology. If you treat people like victims they’ll start acting like victims. If you treat people like tech talent, or if you treat them as transformation experts — it’s a huge word, these are young talented people who have through major disruption in their life and now they have to rebuild it and the skills that they’re getting now in their early 20s is building so incredible resilience that I think in the next five years — if they get the support that are necessary — we’ll see them hopefully becoming startup entrepreneurs.”

Reichart added that the school is looking for 150 mentors to offer one hour of support monthly for six months from January. It will also be looking for 150 internships in June.

Six hours support over six months is not a big time commitment “but could change a life”, she added.

Dan Genduso spent nearly a decade working in consulting before landing on the Disrupt Berlin stage to launch his first startup, Apoll01 — a small company with a big idea about how to solve America’s expanding education crisis. 

First at Accenture and then at Slalom Consulting in San Francisco, Genduso focused on building out customer engagement platforms that captured the workflows, institutional knowledge and digital assets surrounding the development of customer profiles.

“I was building those out and personalizing products and advertisements to people,” Genduso recalled. “I got kind of tired of doing that and started to notice that there were other applications for this technology to enable people instead of enabling companies.”

That realization started Genduso on the path that would culminate with the launch of Apoll01 and its first product, a digital identity management tool, built on Hyperledger, that the Apoll01 founder hopes will be the first step in the transformation of the American educational system.

There’s no doubt that education in the U.S. is at a tipping point. Whether or not anyone ascribes to the belief of Harvard University Professor Clayton Christensen, the progenitor of the popular theory of disruptive innovation, who predicts that “50 percent of the 4,000 colleges and universities in the U.S. will be bankrupt in 10 to 15 years,” there’s no arguing against the fact that a wave of attrition is coming for higher education in the country.

That statistic is sobering, but debatable. However, even the Department of Education and Moody’s Investor Services predict that the number of college and university closures will triple in the coming years. 

What’s worrying to Genduso is that this thinning of educational opportunity for students is occurring alongside what will be rising demand for new skill sets as automation transforms the workforce.

Longer term, Genduso sees Apoll01 as a new platform for managing labor in the age of automation. In a future where automation has erased traditional notions of work, Genduso sees people operating in a more flexible and attenuated gig economy where workers will be matched with short-term projects in the same way that Uber drivers are now matched with riders. He thinks that Apoll01 will be the ledger that has a full accounting of its users’ skillsets and is able to match them with the jobs that need to be filled.

“The same way I was automating operations of a company by making it so there’s no middle man, I realized I could match people to education and to work without the middleman as well,” Genduso says.

That’s the long-term vision, but the first step is getting an identity management system to store all of the different accreditations, certificates and skills that a person has amassed over their educational career in a single place. And that’s what Genduso is launching on the Disrupt stage.

“Right now, think about how there are online training platforms like Salesforce’s Trailhead,” said Genduso. “There are industry-specific schools like blockchain schools. You have specialized training schools and then you have Coursera and Udacity. There’s nothing that’s pulling those things together to put a school system together. No one is pulling that together to create an accreditation and acknowledge that what you’re learning counts.”

That vision was enough to earn Genduso a finalist slot in the U.S. Department of Education’s “Reimagining the Higher Education Ecosystem Challenge” and garner praise from the country’s controversial Secretary of Education, Betsy DeVos. Apoll01 was among a number of companies including Competency Catalyst, EdRec: Next Gen by Design, and FlexchainEdu, trying to create ways for skills learned outside of the traditional classroom to be acknowledged by employers and traditional universities.

Other companies, like Learning Machine, raised $3 million to pursue putting digital diplomas on the blockchain. In fact, traditional universities have already acknowledged the value of the tools and services that Genduso is hoping to develop. In September, Genduso was accepted into the University of Southern California’s Rossier EdVentures education technology incubator.

“The original use case of this product was to start within universities to better understand their students and personalize online education for their students. [Universities] wanted to better understand what their students had been learning outside of the university system from other online learning platforms,” Genduso says.

However, the entrepreneur soon realized that for Apoll01 to be successful, it would have to be independent from the university system.

“The only way there could be a profile that moves outside of the university and within the university was through an independent profile,” says Genduso. So he developed an identity management tool on top of the Hyperledger Fabric open source blockchain toolkit.

Some universities are already putting diplomas and certifications on the blockchain. Learning Machine is working with MIT to put their certifications and digital diplomas into a cryptographically secured ledger, while Southern New Hampshire University and Central New Mexico Community College, both issue blockchain diplomas.

“I’m trying to get away from this world where everyone is screwing everything up by creating these closed systems for the user,” says Genduso. “I’m trying to get people who run these online institutions to get those pilot programs to get that started. My customer is not a university, my customer is every single person… I’m trying to do what’s best for them.”

Apoll01 already has its first customer, through a pilot with the blockchain based education company Teachur, but the company’s vision resonates with a number of different potential customers.

One of those could be edX, the online portal for massive open online courses (MOOCs) that were the darling of the education set only a few years ago. Writing in Quartz, edX chief executive, Anant Agarwal laid out a compelling rationale for Apoll01’s technology.

Education isn’t static. In this future, traditional degrees themselves may become antiquated, and employers will increasingly look for what multifarious skills learners know versus what degree they possess. Modular credentials will be ideal for working professionals who want to update their skillset to suit the shifting job market, better preparing students and adults alike for an excitingly unpredictable future.

Initially, Genduso sees his company getting traction by charging universities a small fee for access to the profiles that his users are generating. Eventually, Apoll01’s chief executive thinks there’s an opportunity to raise money through the tokenization of the platform, where advertisers, continuing education companies, and other vendors in the education space would pay for access to the profiles created on Apoll01’s platform. The key, for Genduso, is to make the system as accessible as possible for the students.

“In the next 10 to 15 years 50 percent of colleges and universities are going to be bankrupt and we’re also heading to a time when 10 percent to 15 percent of people are going to be out of work. When you look at that trajectory how do you as a person in the labor force properly prepare for that?” Genduso asked. “You can start building a profile where you’re building up a transcript that actually counts for something and you can get it from all of these different sources.”

Databases might be the least sexy thing in tech. Second to that might be encryption. That isn’t stopping Kalepso, a Montreal, Canada-based encrypted database startup that’s trying to fill in the gaps in an already crowded security space. (No pressure, then.)

Kalepso says it can do better than other database offerings out there by melding strong security with high reliability, while filling in the spots where sensitive data can be accessed or obtained in the clear. Its Harvard-educated founders found that all the existing database services out there are either slow or insecure. The team says Kalepso, its eponymous database system, sits between the database storage and the application, providing several layers of additional security, which they say doesn’t sacrifice speed, security or functionality of the database. The company launched today at Disrupt Berlin on the Startup Battlefield stage.

In other words, you can access your data securely without it leaking — or getting stolen.

Insider threats, check. Data breaches, protected. Chip-level exploits? No problem, said Kalepso co-founder Georgios Depastas. Kalepso says that its database encryption software covers all bases. Kalepso uses differential privacy to allow database analysis without revealing individuals’ data, while oblivious RAM re-scrambles the database after each query to avoid pattern leakages.

Depastas and team said that they’re already using their technology to help one unnamed financial institution — where data security is paramount — switch from a clunky and cumbersome data transfer setup to Kalepso, by intercepting and encrypting data from its runtime environment in real time and feeding it to its storage server. That means the encrypted data can’t be read on the server — either in storage or its memory. But Kalepso’s technology still lets authorized users run analytics on the data set without decrypting the data. “Every time a new query is fired, the data gets dynamically re-encrypted,” said Depastas, referring to its use of oblivious RAM.

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But what does Kalepso’s security offer better than the other major players — Oracle’s MySQL, PostgreSQL or MongoDB? Kalepso doesn’t have a punchy nor convincing answer.

The product sounds good in theory, but Kalepso faces an uphill battle for relevance. The database and database security market is busy and competitive, and the startup is fighting against a raft of already established database encryption offerings, from Baffle to in-house providers like Amazon. The database market is huge — and growing, as much as double-digit billions by 2025.

Kalepso has so far struggled to find its voice — instead relying on catchy cartoon videos, and buzzwords like “hack-proof data protection” and “military-grade encryption” — terms that draw ire from the security community for their baseless and unprovable claims.

The company gets points for using existing, tried and tested cryptographic standards to scramble the data, but loses points for offering a security product — another layer of code that hackers can use to attack — that isn’t open source. That means the code is proprietary and could have flaws — or worse, susceptible to backdoors or exploitation. “We haven’t experienced significant pushback to this approach,” said Depastas. That may work for now, but it’s not likely to fly in the wider enterprise market, which relies on extensive testing and auditing rather than trust or blind faith.

Three years of research later, there’s hope for Kalepso’s success. The company has a beta product and a staging area for companies to test the product — but little else to show for it, beyond impossible promises and thoughtless marketing.

Augmented reality has been a buzzword for years, but for the most part, it has remained a novelty. WiARframe, which is competing in our Startup Battlefield competition today at Disrupt Berlin, believes that we are still very early on in the AR game and that part of what is holding the market back is that the tools need to become easier to use and that designers need to find better ways to find inspiration for their AR experiences.

WiARframe tackles these issues by providing budding AR designers with an easy-to-use web-based interface for building AR experiences and a community feature that allows them to share these experiences with anybody who downloads the company’s iOS and Android apps.

The actual scene editor, the company’s founder Jeremiah Alexander told me, is modeled after other 3D modeling tools. In it, you can lay out the scene, but then also make it interactive. Typically, developers would do this in a complex and multi-faceted tool like Unity, but Alexander argues that the barrier of entry there is still too high for many non-developers, while wiARframe removes a lot of that complexity by offering a specialized tool that’s only for building AR experiences.”Unity is not for designers,” he told me.

In addition to being able to import 3D models, the tool also allows designers to add menus to a scene that can be used for settings or other in-app experiences.

As Alexander stressed, though, the community aspect of the service may be just as important. The idea here is to allow other designers to take existing scenes and remix them. That’s not unlike what Microsoft is doing with Paint 3D and Remix 3D, though Alexander likened it more to GitHub.

GitHub is also the inspiration for what will likely become wiARframe’s business model in the long run. Like on GitHub, wiARframe users will be able to use the service for free, but their creations will be public. To make them private, users will have to pay. In the long run, the company may also offer an enterprise plan with additional features.

While wiARframe started out with Alexander as a solo founder, the company now has three full-time employees. The team went through the Comcast NBCUniversal Techstars program earlier this year, and Alexander has an extensive background in designing games and other digital products. Indeed, early on in his career, he built tools for developers at Atari.

Alexander compared the state of AR to the early days of the web, where you had to be pretty technical to get started. The idea behind wiARframe is to democratize the ability to create AR content. What remains to be seen is whether that consumer demand for AR will ever crystallize. If it does, tools like wiARframe will surely make it easier for anybody to jump in and build new experiences.

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Easyship, a Hong Kong-based startup that aims to make international shipping for e-commerce as easy as payments, has closed a $4 million Series A round.

The company was founded in 2015 by former Lazada duo Tommaso Tamburnotti and Augustin Ceyrac, and ex-banker Paul Lugagne Delpon. From their time with Lazada, the then-Rocket Internet -owned e-commerce site in Southeast Asia that was later bought by Alibaba, Tamburnotti and Ceyrac came to realize that there was no ‘plug in’ solution for shipping in the same way that Stripe and others enable payments online.

In Lazada’s case, that was crucial. The company was trying to enable cross-border commerce in Southeast Asia and, as a part of that, seek out retailers in more mature markets like China. But, if sending product to Indonesia — Southeast Asia’s largest country with a population of over 250 million — was fraught with challengers, then both retailers and consumers would be put off using the service.

That’s how Easyship was born. Today, the startup works with over 250 services from some 50-plus couriers, it also deals with the likes of Amazon, Shopify, eBay, Etsy, Magento and more. Its team of more than 50 people is spread across offices in New York, Singapore, the Netherlands, Australia, and Hong Kong.

Its service adds shipment options to e-commerce pages to make it simple for retailers to offer overseas shipping, and customers to receive product in any market. They simply input a line of code, which then offers international shipping options for customer when they check out. Not only does it simplify shipping routes but Easyship claims it can help cut shipping costs by up to 60 percent. Its base of 40,000 SMBs have seen their overall sales increase by 40 percent on average.

“We saw there was an opportunity when we couldn’t find a solution that was a gateway for international
shipping,” Ceyrac said in a statement. “For example, it’s easy for sellers to find payment gateways that can be activated in minutes so they can start accepting all major forms of payment. Yet, there was no equivalent tool for logistics, where you could just mobilize on global sales.”

“At the time, the only choices for small business owners were to use large enterprise solutions that were meant for Fortune 500 companies, or to integrate with multiple players to achieve a truly global solution,’ he added.

Tamburnotti told TechCrunch that the new funds will go towards developing the company’s technology — which helps to find cost-effective shipping routes — as well as adding more shipment and logistics partners, and reaching more customers, particularly in the U.S.

The sources of the round are interesting in themselves, too. Maximilian Bittner, who founded Lazada and was its long-time CEO, led the deal alongside Richard Lepeu, the former CEO of luxury firm Richemont and a board member of Yoox Net-A-Porter Group. Existing investor Lamivoie Capital Partners and funds Rubicon Venture Capital, One Way Ventures, Kima Ventures and Picus Capital also joined the round. 500 Startups is another investor in the business.

Easyship’s solution is so logical it almost seems obvious, but it is a business that has been created because it is outside of the U.S. and Silicon Valley. U.S. e-commerce firms have woken up to overseas opportunities, but they tend to be focused on obvious and huge markets like China. Logistics to other parts of the world are fiddling (it’s hugely fragmented) and likely not worth the initial investment unless the investment in a patient one.

But, for Easyship’s founders, the issue of fragmented logistics in Asia became such a critical one that they jumped ship from their full-time jobs — with the blessing of their CEO, Bittner — to tackle the problem. The firm is making ambitious moves in the U.S., having opened a New York office this year, and it’ll be a company to watch. The company has already fielded acquisition offers, but it is aiming to stay independent and grow its share of the U.S. market by enabling retailers, and particularly smaller players, to expand their sales globally.

We’re here at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2018, with the newest batch of Startup Battlefield companies. Each year, TechCrunch chooses a select number of innovative startups to compete in Startup Battlefield — TechCrunch’s premier global startup launch competition. The startups are vying for the famed Disrupt Cup and a $50,000USD equity-free grand prize.

The teams have been training rigorously for several weeks with the Startup Battlefield and TechCrunch editorial teams, perfecting their stage pitch, business models, and live demos. Each team will have exactly 6 minutes to pitch on the Main Stage in front a live audience and a worldwide livestream. Founders will then face an intense Q&A session with our panel of expert judges from industry and VC. The top companies from today will go on to pitch again in the final round of Startup Battlefield on Friday in front of a new panel of judges.

This year’s Startup Battlefield at Disrupt Berlin showcases exceptional startups. You’ll hear from companies that change way we communicate with innovative in-your-pocket audio tech, database encryption, and even automated diabetes management apps. Founders are breaking barriers in connected cars, handicap accessible tech, blockchain framework, and even a new code-free augmented reality design platform. From giving refugees a secure identity, to creating a new model for government decision making, these Startup Battlefield teams are poised to change the face of tech in their industries.

Startup Battlefield begins at 10:45am with Startup Battlefield moderator and Senior Writer Anthony Ha. To learn more about Startup Battlefield, click here. You can also watch the TechCrunch Disrupt live stream here. Get to know the companies here:

Session 1 – 10:45am

wiARframe, Kalepso, Apollo01, V2X Network

Session 2 – 1:05pm

Loro, SPIN Analytics, Polyteia, Gravity.Earth

Session 3 – 4:40pm

Spike Diabetes, Imago AI, Rlay, Koo, Give Legacy**

Friday

Finals – 2:10pm

Check back on Thursday evening on TechCrunch.com to find out who will be competing in the final round for Startup Battlefield at TechCrunch Disrupt Berlin 2018.

**As a part of Startup Alley, companies are eligible for the Wild Card. These are the companies selected for Wild Card and can compete in Startup Battlefield. These teams found out they were competing last night

Disrupt Berlin Day 1 starts now, and we have quite a show in store for you.

We’ll kick the day off with an interview with Roborace’s Lucas di Grassi, and follow it up with conversations with speakers, including Localglobe’s Saul Klein, Lime’s Caen Contee, Taxify’s Markus Villig and Via’s Daniel Ramot.

Then we’ll head into the Startup Battlefield, with 12 startups launching on the Disrupt stage and vying for a chance to win US$50,000, the Disrupt Cup and lifelong glory.

You can catch the whole thing live right here, so sit back, relax and enjoy the show!

Microsoft is readying its HoloLens augmented reality tech for combat. The company just won a $480 million military contract with the U.S. government to bring AR headset tech into the weapon repertoires of American soldiers.

The two-year contract may result in follow-on orders of more than 100,000 headsets according to documentation describing the bidding process. One of the contract’s tag lines for the AR tech seems to be its ability to enable “25 bloodless battles before the 1st battle,” suggesting that actual combat training is going to be an essential aspect of the AR headset capabilities.

“Augmented reality technology will provide troops with more and better information to make decisions. This new work extends our longstanding, trusted relationship with the Department of Defense to this new area,” a Microsoft spokesperson said in a statement sent to TechCrunch.

Magic Leap was also pursuing the contract according to the report in Bloomberg. The military contract bid was perhaps a bit more of a stretch for the company which has previously maintained that its company’s efforts are focused centrally on consumers. The startup has only recently released its first development kit, while Microsoft’s tech has been in developer hands for more than two years.

Some of the documentation (PDF download) surrounding this bid is intensely interesting and really showcases how extensively the military has researched how augmented reality tech can alter the training and combat environments of soldiers.

Obviously, Microsoft wouldn’t just be planning to take what it’s been selling to factory workers and put it onto a battlefield, but the system requirements outlined in the contract already seem to eclipse what the current generation HoloLens optics are capable of, including items like the device’s FoV which will have a requirement of between 55 and 110 degrees.

Other stipulations include the device being no heavier than 1.5 pounds and being compatible with existing military helmets. The head-worn device would specifically track weapons and allow soldiers to see simulated fire from their real weapons while offering offering training with weapons like Javelin missile systems in a completely simulated environment.

These are all just early frameworks, but Microsoft now will be developing technologies that keep the U.S. military at the forefront of augmented reality tech, something that will probably be a boon to their enterprise focused solutions as well.

Fintech startup Revolut has been teasing Asian market expansions for more than a year, but it sounds like it might finally happen. The company has secured licenses to operate in Singapore and Japan. It now expects to launch its service in Q1 2019.

In Singapore, the company was granted a Remittance License by the Monetary Authority and a Stored Value Facility approval — these two things combined let Revolut users hold money as well as send and spend money. In Japan, the company has been authorized to operate by Japan’s Finance Service Agency.

According to Revolut, those approvals are enough to launch the service in those countries. But not all features will make their way to Singapore and Japan. Regulation varies from one country to another, so the company might not be able to provide the same limits and feature set everywhere.

At launch, Revolut will focus on the electronic wallet and the payment card. You won’t be able to buy cryptocurrencies, create business accounts and more. Limits should be more or less the same in local currency equivalent.

In Japan, Revolut says that it has already signed deals with Rakuten, Sompo Japan Insurance (SJNK) and Toppan. It sounds like there will be new insurance products, special card designs and more.

Revolut plans to open its APAC office in Singapore. Let’s see if Revolut ends up convincing expats to sign up or if they can have a real impact outside of Europe.

And if you’re a potential user in the U.S. or Canada, you’ll have to wait a bit more. Revolut says that there will be more news in the coming weeks.