Author: azeeadmin

Owl, the two-way dash cam founded by a team of ex-Apple and Dropcam executives, has secured a $10 million Series A1 round led by Canvas Ventures. This brings Owl’s total funding to $28 million.

“We’ve seen a lot of pent-up demand for car security, and Owl is tapping into that demand with a product that’s easy to install and use,” Canvas Ventures General Partner Rebecca Lynn said in a statement. “This is a testament to the team’s decades of experience building mega-hits like the iPod, iPhone, and Dropcam, and gives them a huge leg up in creating a device and service people feel excited to use every day.”

The Owl camera is designed to monitor your car for break-ins, collisions and police stops. Owl can also be used to capture fun moments (see above) on the road or beautiful scenery, simply by saying, ‘Ok, presto.’

Owl launched back in February to offer an always-on, LTE security camera for your car. Since Owl is always on, it’s able to capture car crashes, break-ins and people dinging your car in the parking lot. If Owl detects a car accident, it automatically saves the video to your phone, including the 10 seconds before and after the accident. At the time of launch, it was only available for iOS but Owl is now making it available for people with Android phones.

The two-way camera plugs into your car’s on-board diagnostics port (Every car built after 1996 has one), and takes just a few minutes to set up. The camera tucks right in between the dashboard and windshield. Once it’s hooked up, you can access your car’s camera anytime via the Owl mobile app.

Another competitor in the market is Raven. While it’s first priority is security, the camera is also designed to keep you connected to your loved ones and provide peace of mind. Raven retails for $299 and includes three months of connectivity. Owl costs $349, which includes one year of instant video via LTE.

You can learn more about Owl in my review below.

Sonatype helps enterprises identify and remediate vulnerabilities in open source library dependencies and release more secure code. Today, they announced a free tool called DepShield that offers a basic level of protection for GitHub developers.

The product is actually two parts. For starters, Sonatype has a database of open source dependency vulnerabilities called OSS Index. The company gathers this information from a variety of public sources, says Sonatype CEO Wayne Jackson. While it isn’t as highly curated as the company’s commercial offerings, it does offer a layer of protection that most individual developers or small shops wouldn’t normally have access to.

After a developer installs DepShield, it checks a code commit in GitHub against the known vulnerabilities in the OSS Index with recommendations on how to proceed. The company’s commercial offerings includes a policy engine to automate remediation. The free version simply lets developers know if there are issues, and they can go back and fix them if need be.

“What DepShield and OSS Index are doing is allowing the developers at the front lines to be able to see what’s happening inside their applications and fix the vulnerabilities directly,” Jackson said.

Vulnerability listed in OSS Index. Screenshot: Sonatype

As for the differences between the commercial and free products, Jackson say it’s a matter of scale. “The way you manage a single application or handful of applications as a developer is different than how you might approach it if you’re a CISO or a governance organization for thousands of applications,” he explained. The latter requires a higher level of automation than the former because of the sheer number of applications involved.

DepShield offers the 28 million developers using GitHub access to a baseline level of protection by identifying a set of known vulnerabilities in their applications before they make them public. Jackson says that GitHub’s role is evolving. Today, it’s not only a tool for committing your code, it’s also become a place to do issue tracking and code reviews, and he believes that as such, a product like DepShield is a natural fit.

Known issues list DepShield. Screenshot: Sonatype

DepShield is available starting today in the Security section of the GitHub Marketplace and developers can download and install it for free.

Sonatype, which is based in Maryland, launched in 2008 and has raised almost $75 million, according to data on Crunchbase. Its most recent funding round was in 2016 for $30 million. Microsoft acquired GitHub in June for $7.5 billion.

LittleBits is making its first acquisition. The New York-based educational hardware company has agreed to acquire DIY.co, an educational social network for kids. Co-founded in 2011 by Vimeo’s Zach Klein, the San Francisco-based software startup is behind the DIY.org online community and jam.com, a subscription-based STEAM educational platform.

“Over the years we’ve explored dozens of acquisitions, strategic deals, mergers,” littleBits founder and CEO Ayah Bdeir told TechCrunch. “We’re very actively looking at that stuff all the time. But DIY, Zach and his team stand out as a match made in heaven.”

DIY’s product will serve as the software foundation for littleBits’ projects moving forward. For starters, the company will provide a kind of software instruction booklet for littleBits’ kits, including a trio of new ones due out this fall. Those will follow the startup’s recent Avengers kits, the second product to take advantage of its Disney accelerator connections.

From there, its seems pretty clear how the company’s social networking and hundreds of hours of online instructional videos will complement littleBits’ long-standing goal of empowering children through STEM educational tools.

“We’re creating an environment where kids are teaching kids,” Klein tells TechCrunch. “That was our mission from day one, to create a space where kids can develop learning strategies for other kids, instead of a one-size-fits-all approach to education. We’re creating an environment where kids are forging the pathways that other kids can find and follow.”

DIY.co, will stay in its San Francisco office, allowing littleBits to expand its presence to the West Coast, where most of its investors are based. The company name and sub-brands like Jam will also remain intact, allowing littleBits to leverage the cachet the brand has built over the years, including some 1.5 million projects uploaded by 550,000 registered users.

DIY’s team of 15 will also stay on, joining littleBit’s existing staff of 100+ employees.

“The expertises are really complementary,” says Bdeir. “Zach’s team, their skill set is in software product and community building and content creation. Those are things we don’t have a lot of expertise in. We wouldn’t be doing this if we weren’t bullish about the future. This is the beginning of us doing many more aggressive steps to becoming the leading learning-to-play company in the world.”

LittleBits is clearly starting to put to use some of the $65 million it’s raised, by growing the company through acquisitions and other means. In the case of DIY, the deal is certainly a complementary one.

“This combination isn’t just about merging two mission-aligned brands,” Jon Callaghan, co-founder of littleBits investor True Ventures, told TechCrunch. “It’s reflective of a larger trend among consumer brands like Peloton and Netflix that recognize that quality content is, once again, king.”

Terms of the deal have not been disclosed.

While nearly every tech giant has publicly proclaimed augmented reality the next frontier to conquer, product movement has been relatively slow as the companies’ aim to nail very base issues in consumer-friendly ways has proven difficult.

Ubiquity6 is one of a handful of startups aiming to tackle the backlog of backend features currently missing from most AR experiences available today. The fast-growing company is looking to build tools that will essentially enable users to create a cloud-based AR copy of the physical world and enable persistent, dynamic multiplayer AR experiences as a result.

Today, the startup announced that it has closed a $27 million Series B led by Benchmark and Index Ventures. The company has raised over $37 million to date with plenty of high-profile VC firms amongst its investor list including Google’s Gradient Ventures, First Round, and KPCB — where Ubiquity6’s CEO Anjney Midha previously helped run a small fund. With this raise, Benchmark GP Mitch Lasky will be joining the Ubiquity6 board.

Multiplayer AR toolsets have been a trend of the year as Google, Apple and a host of other startups have looked to focus on how two or more users can sync their maps of the world in the most seamless way possible. A big focus of the Ubiquity6’s efforts have been on building 3D mesh maps of entire public areas so that that the onboarding process just naturally grows to be instantaneous.

This strategy works great for museums and much less well for your living room, but Ubiquity6 is hoping that the experiences available in their app can have episodic utility that ties them closely with events at public geographic locations.

In more ways than one, the startup seems to be taking a page from Snapchat in their approach to AR but also hopes to leapfrog Snap’s efforts by moving harder and faster into the hard AR tech that the chat app has largely sidestepped. The company’s app, which has yet to launch, has a bit of a carousel-like app selector which can boot up separate AR experiences much like one would switch through Snapchat Lenses.

I had a chance to demo some of the startup’s technology earlier this month and while phone-based AR still generally has a host of usability challenges, Ubiquity6 was able to deliver some interesting scenes that were optimized to be used by up to 100 users concurrently. My demo of adding cubes to an ever-expanding digital art sculpture was certainly simplistic but had a notable lack of hiccups through the entire process.

The company’s partnership with the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art was previewed earlier this month with an activation inside the Magritte exhibit. The experience takes some familiar themes from the artist and allows phone-wilding visitors to step through AR portals and explore the “inner-workings” of the paintings. It’s an intriguing concept that seems particularly well-suited for the surrealist artist.

The company’s app hasn’t launched at a grand scale yet though people interested in testing out a beta of the startup’s tech can sign-up on the their website.

Tesla may be looking to go private, but Chinese rival Nio is going the other way after it filed to raise $1.8 billion in an IPO on the New York Stock Exchange.

Nio was started in 2014, initially as NextCar, by Bin Li, an entrepreneur who founded online automotive services platform Bitauto. The company is backed by Chinese internet giants Baidu and Tencent among others, and it has developed two vehicles so far: the EP9 supercar and ES8.

The former is really a concept/racer car — it broke the electric vehicle speed record last year — but the ES8, pictured above, is a car designed for the masses which is priced at 448,000 RMB, or around $65,000.

Nio opened sales for the ES8 last year but it only began shipping in June. Thus, to date, it has fulfilled just 481 orders, although it claims that there are 17,000 customers who put down reservations waiting in the wings.

That means that, essentially, it is pre-revenue at this point.

The company reported revenue of $6.9 million as of the end of June — so one month of deliveries — with a total loss of $502 million for 2018 to date. Last year, Nio lost $759 million in 2017, that included no revenue and nearly $400 million spent on R&D.

Nio may be in the same space as Tesla, but its approach differs from the U.S. firm. The company operates ‘clubhouses’ where it sells to new customers and allows existing owners to come to spend time, while it also goes direct to consumer with mobile-based sales. (Not, unlike, say an early Xiaomi model.)

Nio’s pricing is more focused on mid-market and, without a charger network like Tesla (most Chinese households would struggle to charge at home), it has developed its own unique way to handle battery charging. Its vehicles support battery swapping at dedicated stations while it operates a range of roaming charging trucks can  reach users who are low on juice.

Those on-demand charging services come as part of a subscription-based package which will add further revenue beyond car sales. Further down the line, the company said its vehicles will be compatible with the national EV charging network China is developing so that’ll help on the charging front, too.

Like China’s infrastructure play, Nio itself is very much a work in progress.

Indeed, case in point, it doesn’t yet operate its own factory.

Right now, state-owned JAC Motors handles product but Nio has pledged to invest $650 million to construct its own manufacturing plant in Shanghai. Nio’s current order backlog will take six to nine months to process, according to the filing, but its own factory could mean orders are dispatched to customers within 28 days of purchase.

The company’s focus is China, but Nio has global roots. Shanghai is its headquarters and home to nearly 2,500 staff, but it also has teams in Munich (design), San Jose (software and self-driving) and London and Oxford in the UK, which handle vehicle concepts.

Its executive team is predominantly Chinese but one familiar name is Padmasree Warrior who is the head of Nio’s U.S. business. The former Motorola CTO joined the company in 2015 after calling time on Cisco, where she spent seven years and had been chief technology and strategy officer.

Despite an international setup, there’s no word in the filing on whether Nio has a timeframe for selling vehicles outside of China. For now, the company cites analyst data claiming that “China is a clear leader in the global EV market” with sales growing from 21,800 in 2013 to 740,900 units last year. That’s despite the Chinese government cutting back on some of its generous subsidies aimed at encouraging early ownership of EVs and eco-friendly hybrid cars.

If there’s one thing we learned hosting last year’s Startup Battlefield in Kenya, it’s that the tech startup scene across Africa is both impressive and growing rapidly. More than 300 tech hubs connect and mentor entrepreneurs across the continent — making it an exciting time and place to be a startup.

And we can’t wait to see even more of Sub-Saharan Africa’s best innovators, makers and technical entrepreneurs compete in TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11. If you haven’t applied yet, what the heck are you waiting for? Submit your application right here and launch your early-stage startup to the world.

We’re searching for the best of the best, and our expert TechCrunch editors will review every eligible application and select up to 15 companies to compete — keep reading for important specifics on who may apply. Among other criteria, the editors will look closely at a startup’s potential to produce an exit or IPO.

Those highly experienced editors will also provide team founders with free and extensive pitch coaching. You might be nervous when the time comes to walk onstage to pitch your company, but trust us — you’ll be ready.

Up to five startups will compete in one of three preliminary rounds, where they’ll have six minutes to pitch and present their demo to a panel of judges composed of entrepreneurs, technologists and VCs (recruited by our editors), all experts in their categories. Following each pitch, the judges have six minutes to ask the tough questions. The judges then choose five startups to pitch again — to a different set of judges.

One of those five startups will be named the TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 champion and take home the grand prize: US$25,000 in no-equity cash, plus a trip for two to compete in Startup Battlefield in San Francisco at our flagship event, TechCrunch Disrupt 2019 (assuming the company still qualifies to compete at the time).

All participating teams reap the benefits that come with broad exposure to a live audience filled with media, influential technologists, entrepreneurs and investors — it can be a life-changing experience.

Here’s what you need to know about eligibility. Startups should:

• Be early-stage companies in “launch” stage
• Be headquartered in one of our eligible countries*
• Have a fully working product/beta that’s reasonably close to, or in, production
• Have received limited press or publicity to date
• Have no known intellectual property conflicts
• Apply by September 3, 2018, at 5 p.m. PST

Want even more details? Read our TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 FAQ.

TechCrunch Startup Battlefield Africa 2018 takes place in Lagos, Nigeria on December 11. Don’t miss your opportunity to launch your startup to the world. Apply right here today. We can’t wait to see what you’ve created!

*Residents in the following countries may apply:

Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cabo Verde, Central Africa Republic, Chad, Comoros, Republic of the Congo, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote d’Ivoire, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Rwanda, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, South Sudan, Sudan, Swaziland, Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia and Zimbabwe. Notwithstanding anything to the contrary in the foregoing language, the “Applicable Countries” does not include any country to or on which the United States has embargoed goods or imposed targeted sanctions.

It seems like everyone is out there raising new funds in Southeast Asia. Weeks after we reported Golden Gate Ventures hit a first close on its third fund aimed at $100 million, so Openspace Ventures — the Singapore-based firm formerly known as NSI — has announced a final close of $135 million for its second fund.

Founded in 2014 by entrepreneur Hian Goh and finance exec Shane Chesson, Openspace is best known for being an early backer of Indonesian ride-hailing unicorn Go-Jek. A selection of its other investments includes fintech startup FinAccel, e-commerce player Love Bonito, restaurant booking service Chope, health-focused insurance brokerage CXA Group, and bread maker Rotimatic.

Openspace specializes in Series A with a typical check size of $3 million to $5 million, and capital for follow-on deals. Goh told TechCrunch around the time of the first close that the plan is to expand the focus on startups operating marketplaces and/or the e-commerce space to cover emerging verticals such as fintech, health tech and education.

Chesson, his partner, said that in areas like healthcare, progress from startups has been “remarkable” while he sees “great opportunities” to develop new kinds of consumer-centric brands in e-commerce, both B2C and B2B.

Beyond vertical expansion, the firm may also seek opportunities in new geographies — it invested alongside Go-Jek in Bangladesh-based on-demand service Pathao, for example. It also plans to utilize local teams in Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam and perhaps expand its network to more markets, too.

The target for the capital is Southeast Asia, a region of more than 650 million consumers where rising internet access is creating new opportunities for tech startups and internet-based businesses.

A report co-authored by Google last year forecast the region’s internet economy reaching $200 billion per year by 2025, up from $31 million in 2015. Already, Southeast Asia has more internet users than the U.S. population, and the total value of its digital economy was said to reach $50 million in 2017.

Between 2016 and 2017, investors pumped over $12 billion into Southeast Asia-based startups. It’s an impressive stat, but most of the capital was captured by the largest businesses and that’s why more seed and early-stage funds are needed — and are arriving — in the region.

The Openspace Ventures team

At investor level, there certainly seems to be a growing appetite among global LPs, the investors who fund the funds.

Openspace, for example, was originally targeting a $125 million raise, but the firm said it saw significant interest and so raised the additional figure to “embed deeper regional and operating capabilities” into its team.

Singapore sovereign fund Temasek and U.S. PE firm StepStone Group are among the named LPs. Openspace said others include pension funds, university endowments, insurance companies and family offices across the U.S., Europe, Japan, China and Australia.

“For most of these LPs, Openspace is their first and only investment in this region. For some, they have returned and increased their commitment since fund one,” Chesson told TechCrunch via email. “It has taken some time for LPs of this caliber to get comfortable with the region, but we are pleased that we now have the track record at the fund and the interest in the region to bring them on board.”

“This is a big change from a few years back and is a testament to all the entrepreneurs and ecosystem partners who have developed this market so rapidly. There is still much work to be done though in fulfilling the promise, realizing gains, filling in gaps in the regional capability set and we look forward to being part of this,” he added.

This second pot has already been open and, combined with a $90 million debut fund, the firm has backed 19 startups to date. That portfolio, it said, has raised over $2.6 billion in follow-on capital which, even without $2 billion from Go-Jek, is pretty impressive. Indeed, Openspace says its inaugural fund is ranked the third best performing VC fund in the 2003-2015 bracket, according to investment tracking service Preqin.

911 and other emergency numbers have been a key route for people to contact medical, police or fire services, with some 240 million calls are made for urgent help in the US alone each year. But while calling the numbers is a breeze, sometimes passing on crucial information is far from that, with most of these services built and operating on legacy infrastructure that makes pinpointing accurate locations and getting more detail about the problem (including to determine whether the call might have been in error) is a challenge.

Now a company that has developed a system to improve emergency response is announcing a round of funding in the race to update those platforms.

Carbyne, a startup out of Israel that has developed a new emergency callout platform that helps providers pinpoint a callers’ exact location and enable other services to improve and speed up communication and response times — by some 65 percent on average — has raised $15 million in Series B funding.

The round is significant not just because of the boost that it will give to Carbyne itself, but because of who is doing the backing. Led by Elsted Capital Partners, it also includes Founders Fund, the VC that has backed the likes of Facebook and Airbnb, but also startups that have made strong inroads into working with government and other public sector organizations on data-based services, such as Palantir, Anduril and Deep Mind (now a part of Google).

Previous backers of Carbyne have included the former prime minister of Israel, Ehud Barak, who is also the company’s chairman, and the company has now raised about $24 million, with a valuation that I understand to be in the region of $100 million, although the company is not commenting on the number.

Most of the emergency calling services that are in place around the world were built to be used with legacy wired phone networks. In many countries, however, not only are people doing away with their fixed lines, but they are making these calls from mobile phones — in some cases up to 80 percent of all emergency calls are coming from mobile phones. This means that not only are some inbound calls to public safety answering points (PSAPs) unable to provide the data that the legacy systems need, but — coming from smartphones — they potentially could provide a far richer set of data, if the systems were set up to receive it.

On top of this, it can simply take too long, or be impossible, for a reporter of an emergency to convey crucial information through a phone conversation. (Indeed, the idea for the service was hatched after founder Amir Elichai discovered how long it took to identify his location and other details to emergency services after he was mugged.)

Carbyne — originally called Reporty and rebranded earlier this year to the word for what is now considered to be the world’s strongest substance — lets emergency response providers connect with reporters through two products to fill that gap.

There is an app, called C-Now, that people can download on iOS or Android to provide instant video, down-to-one-meter location data, and lots of other details when making a report to emergency response call centre. (This potentially can include whatever an emergency response organization might want to collect, within the scope of a phone and the data that it can pick up either directly or via APIs from other devices, such as heart rate monitors.) The app is live in 161 countries.

There is also a service, C-Lite, that plugs directly into legacy 911 services, which lets PSAPs send links to reporters to collect additional information without the reporter needing to download an app, and without the PSAP needing to upgrade its legacy systems. Both C-Lite and the app are cloud-based to create more redundancy in case of service outages. The company also says that it is GDPR compliant and uses “military-grade” security protocols to protect people’s information when they call.

Between all of that, the company has also developed technology to pinpoint locations in indoor spaces, and also a platform that monitors all calls and other data (such as video coming from a surveillance camera) at a specific location in order to build a more comprehensive picture of the emergency.

Carbyne is not the only startup that is looking to fill the gap between legacy 911 offerings and the promises of what the next generation of cloud-based communication and mobile technology can bring to improve efficiency in these services. RapidSOS provides a bridge between mobile phone calls to 911 and legacy 911 PSAP services, so that those making calls on mobile can still provide location data. RapidSOS also serves as a supplement that works just on mobile in the event that the legacy system falls over, and it really came into its own during the trio of tropical disasters last autumn across Puerto Rico, Texas and Florida.

Like Carbyne, RapidSOS has some big-name supporters: it is backed by former FCC chairmen Tom Wheeler and Julius Genachowski, in addition to a range of other investors. It’s also now integrated with services like Uber and Apple’s iOS for faster reporting of location.

One of the points of differentiation between RapidSOS and Carbyne is that the latter is potentially a full replacement for the 911 system in the event that an organization was considering that route. Elichai said that there are several organizations evaluating Carbyne now in across Europe, and it is already rolling out its service in Fayette County in Georgia.

But by and large there aren’t many startups looking to disrupt this area, which was one reason why Founders Fund was interesting in backing the company. “I’m looking for businesses that aren’t massively competitive, and Carbyne stands alone in a really unpopular industry,” Trae Stephens, a partner at the firm who is leading the investment, told TechCrunch. “In the world of emergency services, it’s really important for tech to contribute to fixing some of the antiquated systems, and that is what excited me. I definitely looked at other companies in emergency services, but but nothing came remotely close to the approach that Carbyne has taken, which is platform-agnostic.”

Longer term, Elichai said that while emergency services will remain a primary interest, there are potential other areas where its technology could be applied.

“We see ourselves connecting any device to the platform,” he said in an interview. “Because of the fact that we have a strong real-time communications platform, we have received request from other industries.” These have included, for example, insurance companies.

“If you ski in Aspen or Chamonix, you get extreme sports insurance. If you have to make a claim, most people ski with their cell . phones now, and if you use Carbyne you would be able to open the claim automatically with evidence from the scene, making checking and processing much more efficient.”

A week after spinning out its driver services business and giving it $1 billion in investment capital, Didi Chuxing has added to it through an acquisition.

Xiaoju Automobile Solutions (XAS), which the Didi spinout is called, announced today it has bought Hiservice, a three-year-old company that provides after-service care for car owners using a digital platform.

The deal was undisclosed, but XAS said that Hiservice will be combined with its maintenance and repair division to form a new unit that’s focused on car-owner services such as maintenance, parts and components. That’ll be called Xiaoju Auto Care (小桔养车) for those of you who are keeping up with the names of these Didi subsidiaries.

That auto care business will be jointly run by Yinbo Yi, who had run Didi’s auto care business, and Hiservice founder Cheng Qian, Didi confirmed. The new business claims 28 physical maintenance centers across seven cities in Asia.

Didi’s move to create XAS, which removes an asset-heavy business from the core Didi books, is seen by many as a sign that the company plans to go public soon. Unsurprisingly, Didi isn’t commenting on that at this point. The company was last valued at $56 billion when it raised a $4 billion round late last year — it has since added a $500 million strategic investment from travel company Booking Holdings.

While it is organizing its China-based business, Didi has also spent this year expanding into new markets. It has launched in Mexico, Australia and Taiwan while it acquired Uber rival 99 in Brazil. It is also edging close to launching a taxi-booking service in Japan via a joint venture with SoftBank.

Down in the dumps while the cryptos are getting rekt? Quirky billionaire and long-time Bitcoin bull Tim Draper is here for you with what is apparently called a rap song.

Draper performed a version of this thing at The Next Web’s event earlier this year… yes, I had to listen to both. Anyhow, we wish it had ended there. It didn’t.

[Blame Drew for making us aware of this]

Note: The author owns a small amount of cryptocurrency. Enough to gain an understanding, not enough to change a life.