Author: azeeadmin

Indian food delivery startup Zomato said on Tuesday evening that it has raised $562.3 million from its anchor investors ahead of IPO opening on Wednesday.

Zomato, which counts Ant Financial  has already secured nearly 45% of the $1.3 billion it plans to raise through the IPO, the 12-year-old Gurgaon-headquartered startup revealed in a filing to local stock exchanges. The public share sale will open on Wednesday and close Friday.

Tiger Global, Fidelity, New World, Baillie Gifford, Government of Singapore, Canada Pension Plan, Mirae Asset, T. Rowe Price, and Steadview are among the investors that are backing the startup in the public markets.

The investors have subscribed the shares at Rs 76 ($1) — the upper end of the price range for Zomato’ shares — giving the Indian startup an implied valuation of $8.6 billion, up from $5.4 billion in February this year.

The oversubscription illustrates the confidence high-profile investors are placing in the world’s second largest internet market’s first real consumer internet offering.

In a virtual press conference last week, Zomato executives said the startup, which has search and discovery in nearly two dozen markets, will focus largely on India and will explore categories such as online grocery delivery in the future.

The executives also dismissed Amazon as a serious competitor for now. “There’s no major impact on market share from Amazon so far,” the company’s chief financial officer said. Amazon entered the food delivery market last year and is operational in just Bangalore for now. Swiggy, backed by SoftBank Vision Fund 2 and Prosus Ventures, is Zomato’s chief rival in India.

For the financial year that ended in March this year, its revenue was down 23% to $283 million, and it also shrank its losses to $110 million, down 66% from the same period a year ago.

Technology plays a huge role in nearly every aspect of financial services today. As the world moved online, tools and infrastructure to help people manage their money and make payments have burgeoned the world over in the past decade.

With much of the finance world now leveraging technology to conduct business, predict trends and deliver services, financial services regulators are also developing new technologies to monitor markets, supervise financial institutions and conduct other administrative activities. The emergence of purpose-built technologies to facilitate regulator oversight has, over the past few years, garnered its own moniker of supervisory technology, or suptech.

Interest in suptech is proliferating across the globe thanks to a diverse set of prudential and conduct regulators. A sampling of regulators developing suptech include the FDIC, CFPB, FINRA and Federal Reserve in the U.S.; the U.K.’s FCA and Bank of England; the National Bank of Rwanda in Africa; as well as the ASIC, HKMA and MAS in Asia. Several “super regulators” are also engaged in suptech efforts such as the Bank of International Settlements, the Financial Stability Board and the World Bank.

In this post, we’ll examine a few core suptech use cases, consider its future and explore the challenges facing regulators as the market matures. The uses are diverse, so we’ll focus on three key areas: regulatory reporting, machine-readable regulation, and market and conduct oversight.

A quick general note: Nearly every financial services regulator is engaged in some type of suptech activity and the use cases discussed in this article are intended as a sample, not a comprehensive list.

But what exactly is suptech?

As a preliminary matter, we should quickly survey a few definitions of suptech to frame our understanding. Both the World Bank and BIS have offered definitions that provide useful outlines for this discussion. The World Bank states that suptech “refers to the use of technology to facilitate and enhance supervisory processes from the perspective of supervisory authorities.” It’s a little circular, but helpful.

The BIS defines suptech as “the use of technology for regulatory, supervisory and oversight purposes.” This is a similarly loose definition that describes the broader scope better.

Regardless of differences on the margins, the “sup” in these suptech definitions acknowledges the primacy of the idea that regulators’ objectives are to oversee the conduct, structure, and health of the financial system. Suptech technologies facilitate related regulatory supervision and enforcement processes.

Regulatory reporting

Regulatory reporting refers to a broad swath of activities such as financial firms providing trading data to regulatory authorities and regulators’ analysis of financial data or corporate information to determine the projected health or potential risks facing an institution or the market.

The MAS and FDIC are incorporating transactional and financial data reported by firms as a means to assess their financial viability. The MAS, in conjunction with BIS, has run tech sprints soliciting new ideas relating to regulatory reporting, while the FDIC has “a regulatory reporting solution that would allow ‘on-demand’ monitoring of banks as opposed to being constrained by ‘point-in-time’ reporting. This project is particularly targeted at smaller, community banks that provide only aggregated data on their financial health on a quarterly basis.”

The HKMA recently outlined its three-year plan for the development of suptech, which includes developing an approach to “network analysis.” The HKMA will analyze reporting data related to corporate shareholding and financial exposure to bring them “to life as network diagrams, so that the relationships between different entities become more apparent. Greater transparency of the connections and dependencies between banks and their customers will enable HKMA supervisors to detect early warning signals within the entire credit network.”

These reporting initiatives touch on a theme regulators have continuously struggled with: How to regulate markets and firms based on a reactive approach to historical data. Regulation and enforcement are often retrospective activities — examining past behavior and data to decide how to sanction an organization or develop a regulatory framework to govern a particular type of activity or financial product. This can result in an approach to regulation too rooted in past failures, which might lack the flexibility to anticipate or adapt to emerging risks or financial products.

The online chat platform Discord is buying Sentropy, a company that makes AI-powered software to detect and remove online harassment and hate.

Discord currently uses a “multilevel” approach to moderation, relying on an in-house human moderation team as well as volunteer mods and admins to create ground rules for individual servers. A Trust and Safety team dedicated to protecting users and shaping content moderation policies comprised 15% of Discord’s workforce as of May 2020.

Discord plans to integrate Sentropy’s own products into its existing toolkit and the company will also bring the smaller company’s leadership group aboard. The terms of the deal were not disclosed, but the acquisition is a sign that taking toxic content and harassment seriously isn’t just the right thing to do — it’s good business too.

“T&S tech and processes should not be used as a competitive advantage,” Sentropy CEO John Redgrave said in a blog post on the announcement. “We all deserve digital and physical safety, and moderators deserve better tooling to help them do one of the hardest jobs online more effectively and with fewer harmful impacts.”

Discord hasn’t always had a reputation for taking dangerous content seriously. Far-right groups with ties to real-world violence previously thrived on the platform. Discord cracked down on hate and extremism following the Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, which left anti-racist protester Heather Heyer dead.

By February of 2018, the company was purging white supremacist and neo-Nazi groups, cleaning up the platform on its journey to transcend its gaming roots and grow into a mainstream social network. Now, Discord boasts 150 million monthly active users and is positioning itself as a comfy home for all kinds of communities while holding onto its core user base of gamers.

In a blog post, Redgrave elaborated on the company’s natural connection with Discord:

“Discord represents the next generation of social companies — a generation where users are not the product to be sold, but the engine of connectivity, creativity, and growth. In this model, user privacy and user safety are essential product features, not an afterthought. The success of this model depends upon building next-generation Trust and Safety into every product. We don’t take this responsibility lightly and are humbled to work at the scale of Discord and with Discord’s resources to increase the depth of our impact.”

Sentropy launched out of stealth last summer with an AI system designed to detect, track and cleanse platforms of online harassment and abuse. The company emerged then with $13 million in funding from notable backers including Reddit co-founder Alexis Ohanian and his VC firm Initialized Capital, King River Capital, Horizons Ventures and Playground Global.

Sentropy will offer existing enterprise customers who use its software products Detect and Defend service through the end of September. The company shut down its free consumer dashboard, Sentropy Protect, earlier this month.

Sentropy’s products were conceived as social network-agnostic tools rather than as platform-specific solutions. It sounds like even under Discord’s wing, the team plans to share insights on building safer online spaces with the internet at large.

“We are excited to help Discord decide how we can most effectively share with the rest of the Internet the best practices, technology, and tools that we’ve developed to protect our own communities,” Redgrave said.

Just under a week after Beyond Meat announced that it will be releasing a reworked version of its plant-based Chicken Tenders at restaurants in the U.S., the faux meat company has returned with a potentially sizable restaurant partnership.

Starting July 26, select Panda Express restaurants in Southern California and New York City will offer an orange chicken dish using Beyond’s chicken product. It’s a big potential partnership for Beyond, as the Asian American fast food chain currently has 2,200 locations, largely in food courts and other high-traffic spots.

It could also be a big step for Panda Express, which has traditionally had fairly limited vegetarian options. You know it’s a bit dire for veggies when the press release lists “steamed white and brown rice” as two of its six “plant-based dishes.”

Image Credits: Beyond Meat

Beyond Meat isn’t calling it a pilot, exactly, but notes in an email to TechCrunch, “we are confident that people will love the new menu item and we will keep our guests updated with information on additional rollouts.” One assumes a larger rollout depends on early feedback and perceived consumer demand for a non-meat-based main dish.

“Beyond The Original Orange Chicken is the next step in the brand’s journey to offer more diverse and plant-based options, while still delivering comfort and crave-ability in innovative ways,” Panda Express’  chef Jimmy Wang said in a release tied to the soft launch. “Creating a fresh new take on a classic favorite is a great and accessible way to introduce plant-based proteins to our guests and perhaps even drawing a new audience for Panda.”

Baby steps, but anything that helps reduce meat consumption is probably a net positive. Beyond also recently inked a deal to bring plant-based pepperoni to select Little Caesars locations. Beyond also has deals with White Castle, Denny’s and Dunkin’ for its various plant-based meat substitutes.

Investors are buying into a creator-led future, and Nas Academy wants to turn that creator influence into a broad network of “virtual universities.”

The Singapore startup is building out a platform for creators to monetize their knowledge, giving them the tools to create their own classes and academies that fans can attend online. The platform is founded and led by Nuseir Yassin, a video blogger and influencer whose Nas Daily social media accounts boast tens of millions of followers across platforms.

Nas Academy has closed an $11 million Series A led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with additional backing from Balaji Srinivasan, Emilie Choi, TechAviv Founder Partners, Visioneer Holdings, 500 Startups and Metapurse, among others.

The platform can help creators build on-demand class portfolios or live courses, while the marketplace allows users to navigate and shop around for courses that appeal to them. Yassin hopes the platform can bring some predictability to consumers who are interested in signing up for online courses, but are wary of scams and half-baked offerings. “This market needs to have some trusted brands and quality assurances,” he says.

At the moment, a good chunk of the courses skew towards the business of online influence, with classes on video editing, content marketing and entrepreneurship. It’s also a pretty wide range of price points with costs for courses live on the platform now ranging from $29 to $499. Users can also pay for a bundle of courses, and Yassin says the platform has plans for a subscription offering down the road.

Nas Academy will monetize by taking a cut of these revenues, which may vary a bit, especially right now as the platform is invite-only for creators. As the platform opens up further, Yassin wants it to be a way for creators to find new audiences too. Course operators will have access to emails of their audience and be able to reach out to them directly outside the platform if they so desire.

Investors have been increasingly signing on to back startups building products in the creator economy vertical, especially in the past year. Creator platform Patreon recently raised at a $4 billion valuation. Yassin sees a massive opportunity in not only facilitating closer relationships between creators and fans but serving as an on-ramp for aspiring creators coming to their platform to learn.

“We think there are another 100,000 creators who will never get asked to make a Masterclass,” Yassin tells TechCrunch. “Internet skills are low in supply and high in demand.”

Zero Motorcycles has been around for over a decade and in that time it’s consistently improved its fleet of electric bikes. With the new FXE, the northern California company has taken the thoroughly enjoyable FXS supermoto and transformed it into something a bit more futuristic looking with a new easier-to-parse display.

The FXE likely isn’t a great pick for two-wheeled beginners or for folks that want a weekend cruiser, but for the experienced rider who needs a daily commuter that packs agility and power into a fun package, the 100-mile range FXE might be the best way to get to and from work. Watch our first ride video for the full story.

Editor’s note: This post originally appeared on Engadget. Roberto Baldwin is an Engadget contributor. 

In the past year, many of the conversations around autonomous vehicles (AVs) have been dominated by the same question: When will self-driving cars be the norm on public roads?

While industry leaders talked a big game on AVs monopolizing our roads back in 2016, today some experts have put widespread Level 4 adoption over a decade away. However, even that timeline only works if automakers overcome significant barriers — both technical and behavioral. The challenge of bringing AVs to consumers will be tougher than anticipated, with a central part of the effort being focused on earning the public’s trust.

Consumer confidence and mass adoption of AVs go hand in hand. To meet the projected timelines and start building this critical trust today, automakers should accelerate the adoption of autonomous capabilities into advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS).

The challenges facing current ADAS technologies

The truth is that consumers do not yet trust the ADAS capabilities in their vehicles. A 2021 AAA Foundation for Traffic Safety survey found that 80% of drivers wanted current vehicle safety systems, like automatic emergency braking and lane-keeping assistance, to work better, noting the lack of confidence consumers feel around current offerings.

Despite significant recent advancements in the industry, including announcements from Cruise gaining permission to give rides in driverless test vehicles to passengers in California, AAA studies indicate that still only one in 10 drivers would be comfortable riding in a self-driving car. While consumers seem to be aware that AV technologies are advancing quickly, this lack of trust from users will be a major barrier to full adoption and can pose a threat to the industry — no matter how far along the technology develops.

To aid in building the public’s confidence, the industry must focus today on more advanced and reliable ADAS to meet consumer demands. However, current offerings face major challenges that must be resolved before the majority of consumers will get on board:

1. Lack of reliability in common adverse conditions: Technologies including lidar and camera are limited to what they can “see” around them. These systems can be easily obstructed by snow, dirt and debris covering the vehicle’s sensors. Additionally, without clear, crisp lane markings — in the event of snow, heavy rainfall or off-road conditions — or strong GPS signals, the typical sensors tracking vehicle location will not function properly.
2. Poor detection: There have been several cases where ADAS technologies have been unable to detect degraded lane markings, pedestrians, other vehicles or common on-road objects, resulting in injury and even death for drivers and pedestrians.
3. Low understanding by the general public: While some ADAS features are designed to operate independently, there is still a consistent lack of public knowledge when it comes to understanding how to best utilize the systems’ abilities to maximize safety. This lack of awareness poses an unnecessary threat to drivers who inadvertently misuse the technology as well as to those with whom they share the roads.

Addressing these challenges and creating better automated driving experiences for consumers is a critical step to mass adoption of future AV technology. The most immediate opportunity to move the needle with consumer acceptance in this area is to target improving reliability and user experience — especially with dynamic vehicle safety systems. To do so, automated and autonomous vehicles need improved sensors and software that enhance today’s systems and, as a result, boost consumer confidence in the safety of automated capabilities.

A fresh perspective on vehicle positioning

In the last decade, the industry has made various advancements in positioning systems, which locate a vehicle to the centimeter on roadways and are critical additions to traditional hardware stacks. As a result, experts have been placing bets on technologies such as ground-penetrating radar and novel mapping techniques as the final missing piece to robust vehicle positioning due to their ability to operate in adverse driving conditions and navigate highly dynamic environments.

While it is clear there are different avenues AVs can take to increase their reliability on the road, automakers are still trying to determine which approach can unlock the change in performance required for broad adoption.

When taking a closer look at the differentiators that make these technologies stand out, a common thread is how they address three critical issues: the absence of roadside features such as on open highways, within parking lots or when a car is boxed in by trucks and vision is limited; the reliance of camera-based systems on clear, consistent lane markings; and quickly changing environments in which the scene on the surface looks different from one moment to the next and HD maps quickly become unusable. These common challenges have left consumers frustrated with inconsistent and unreliable ADAS features.

One way to overcome these critical gaps is to explore other avenues for reliable vehicle positioning such as ground-penetrating radar — which allows vehicles to determine their precise location in adverse weather or in rough terrain, amid poor GPS availability and other common barriers faced by automated systems today — to show improved autonomy is possible. By adding these novel approaches into vehicles, automakers can create more reliable and accurate ADAS features — safeguarding the automated driving experience.

Leaning on ADAS as a vehicle for consumer confidence and mass AV adoption

A recent study from Partners for Automated Vehicle Education (PAVE) found that consumers familiar with ADAS technology were more likely to feel positive about autonomous cars and that 75% who currently own a vehicle with ADAS features say they are excited about future safety technology. This shows consumer engagement in today’s ADAS features can lead to more positive attitudes on tomorrow’s AV adoption.

As an industry, where do we go from here? Many are finding that there is a unique opportunity to resolve the future issues of autonomous vehicle operations by attacking them head-on in present-day ADAS systems — where they will otherwise be a future problem that will block mass adoption.

We need to address these critical issues with ADAS technologies and create better driving experiences to earn the public’s trust. By using higher-performing ADAS as a pathway to mass AV adoption, we can arrive at the destination safely.

The industry, along with consumers, can build a safe autonomous future.

Electrify America, the entity set up by Volkswagen as part of its settlement with U.S. regulators over its diesel emissions cheating scandal, said it will double the number of its electric vehicle fast charging stations in the United States and Canada by the end of 2025.

The commitment, if successful, means 1,800 fast charging stations — or 10,000 individual chargers — will be installed and operational by that time. The vast majority (some 1,700 stations) will be installed in the United States with the remainder in Canada. This will build off of EA’s plans to have about 800 charging stations and about 3,500 individual chargers in the U.S. by the end of 2021.  As of today, Electrify America has installed 635 charging stations in the United States.

The plan is part of parent company VW Group’s announcement Monday to increase public charging infrastructure in North America, Asia and Europe. The expansion aims to increase the number of 150 and 350 kilowatt chargers, or fast chargers. VW nor EA disclosed how much money would be spent to meet this new plan. However, an EA spokesperson did confirm that the company would be spending more than the $2 billion it previously committed to invest into clean energy infrastructure over a 10-year period that kicked off in 2017.

The decision to double its charging infrastructure in North America was prompted by the rapid growth expected of electric vehicles by virtually all the auto manufacturers, according to a statement by Electrify America president and CEO Giovanni Palazzo.

The EV market was once the primary domain of Tesla, the Nissan Leaf and GM’s Chevrolet Bolt EV. And while the majority of vehicles on the road today are gas and diesel-powered, an increasing number of other EV models have, or are about, to come to market, including the Ford Mustang Mach-E, Porsche Taycan and the Cross Turismo variant, Hyundai Kona Electric, Jaguar I-Pace, Rivian R1T pickup truck and R1S SUV and the VW ID. 4.

Electrify America’s initial plan was to invest more than $2 billion over a 10-year period into clean energy infrastructure and education. Of that funding, some $800 million was earmarked for California, the largest EV market in North America. This latest boost will be used to increase chargers in established EV regions in the U.S. such as California as well as push into new states, including Hawaii, North Dakota, South Dakota, West Virginia, Wyoming and Vermont.

The company is also adding chargers to a stretch of highway in the upper Midwest, following similar efforts to promote cross-country travel. The subsidiary Electrify Canada will expand its network to nine provinces, including Saskatchewan, Manitoba, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island. Electrify Canada will also add more stations to British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario and Quebec, the four provinces where it already has a presence.

The addition of MagSafe to the iPhone 12 line introduced all manner of fun avenues for accessory makers, but there’s a strong case (so to speak) to be made that a snap on battery pack might be the most useful of all. A number of third-parties (notably Anker and Mophie) have introduced their own versions, and now Apple’s getting in on the action.

[gallery ids="2176873,2176872,2176871,2176870"]

The simply-named MagSafe Battery Pack went up for pre-order on Apple’s site today for $99, with an estimated arrival of July 19. The new pack comes in white (with a subtly gray Apple logo on the back to let people know you went first-party) and provides up to 15W of wireless charging, per the company.

Other details are scarce at the moment, including  precisely how many phone charges you’ll get out of the pack. Eagle-eyed viewers noticed on the rear of the device, fine-print noting the 1,460 mAh size. The pack itself charges via Lightning port, and users can plug it in with the phone attached to get a quicker charge to both the pack and battery at once.

The price is a premium, compared to Anker and Mophie’s products, which run around the $45-50 range for a 5,000 mAh battery.

There’s a reason startup compensation packages usually include equity, or stock options. For one, it’s a way for startups to remain competitive in the job market and attract top talent. But it’s also a way to reward those employees who join early and give them a tangible reason to stay incentivized to grow the company.

The problem is that while many employees do understand that their equity compensation could mean a big payday in the future — and, in 2021, that’s more likely than ever — they don’t often understand the inevitable complexities of their stock options. That puts employees at risk of not getting the most value after an IPO or, worse, losing them.

If you’ve ever been confused about your equity, or haven’t thought much about it, you’re not alone. That’s why I’m going to share three things all employees joining a startup should do with their equity:

Understand how to value your equity — and when it can change

While many startups are getting better at proactively communicating the value of your equity package upfront, some are still figuring out the best way to do it. That’s because, unlike the more straightforward number of a salary, stock options are more nuanced — they’re a living, breathing type of compensation.

The most important pieces of information to pay attention to are your 409A valuation, your strike price, the type of options you were granted and the preferred share price.

The 409A valuation is based on your company’s valuation. This is also referred to as the fair market value (FMV). The 409A valuation can, and does, often change — they have to be updated at least once a year by a third-party valuator in order to meet tax rules. The 409A also changes during a fundraising event. Investors involved in the funding round determine how they value the company and are given options, at that valuation, in exchange for cash.

Since the company has now been valued higher, the 409A changes for everyone. It’s also possible for the 409A to go down if, for any reason, the company is now valued at a lower amount. This is known as a “down round.” Airbnb had a notable down round during the pandemic, though it eventually recovered and went public.

Your strike price is the price at which you can buy your stock options (also known as exercising). Yes, buy. You are given the option to buy them, which is why they are called stock options. But know that your strike price will likely never change. However, if you’re ever given more stock options (perhaps as a future bonus), this would be a separate grant and the strike price could be different. Companies are legally required to issue stock options at the most recent 409A price (or higher).