Author: azeeadmin

London-based insurtech hyperexponential (“hx”) – which has a mathematical modeling software for the commercial insurance sector – has closed an $18m funding round led by growth capital fund Highland Europe.

Hxsays it helps companies build, deploy and update their insurance pricing models faster, via a SaaS platform called Renew which is aimed at actuaries, data-scientists and underwriters.

Amrit Santhirasenan, hx’s CEO and co-founder, said: “The insurance industry is experiencing unprecedented growth, with data and technology being critical strategic drivers. Our software provides the tools that new entrants to the sector need in order to get to market with best-in-class analytics, and the functionality that incumbent insurers require in order to transform.”

Launched in 2017 by Santhirasenan and co-founder Michael Johnson, both software engineers and qualified actuaries, it now services a client base in charge of $50bn worth of premium.

Laurence Garrett, Partner at Highland Europe, said: “We believe hx offers a unique combination of actuarial expertise and software engineering knowhow that delivers exactly the tools that commercial insurers need as their marketplace continues to evolve and transform. This is a sector that is changing very rapidly and hx has already demonstrated considerable growth; we want to help them bring their cloud-based tools and innovation to even more insurers and insurtech companies.”

IDnow, a German-based identity verification startup is acquiring ARIADNEXT, a French equivalent, specializing in remote identity verification and digital identity creation. A price was not released by either party but TechCrunch understands from sources that the deal was approximately $59 million / €50 million. Sources say IDnow is looking to do similar acquisitions.

IDnow says the combined entity will be able to provide a comprehensive identity verification platform, ranging from AI-driven to human-assisted technology and from online to point-of-sale verification options. IDnow offers its services into the UK, French and German, Spain, Poland, Romania, and other international markets, and says it expects to increase revenue 3x in 2021 versus 2019.

The startup also says the pandemic has meant usage of its products has gone up 200% more compared to last year as companies switch to digital processes.

Andreas Bodczek, CEO of IDnow said in a statement: “This combination with ARIADNEXT is an important step towards our vision of building the pan-European leader for identity verification-as-a-service solutions. With ARIADNEXT, in addition to our recent acquisition of identity Trust Management AG, IDnow can provide our customers with an even broader suite of products through a single platform with a seamless user experience.”

Guillaume Despagne, President of ARIADNEXT, said: “We are looking forward to joining a team of IDnow’s caliber, combining our experience and skills to work towards our shared vision of providing a pan-European secure and future-proof solution to customers.

IDnow will retain ARIADNEXT’s locations in Rennes, Paris, Madrid, Bucharest, Iasi, and Warsaw, as well as its over 125 employees. The acquisition is subject to regulatory approvals.

The acquisition means IDNow is now on a par with the other large player in Europe, OnFido. TechCrunch understands the company has done €50m+ revenue this year expect to over-perform its €100m revenue target for 2023.

Ably is a Pub/Sub messaging platform that companies can use to develop realtime features in their products. The company just raised a $70 million Series B funding round co-led by Insight Partners and Dawn Capital.

Every day, you use various apps that push and fetch data in realtime. When you send a message in your favorite chat app, when you edit a document collaboratively, when you start a video call or when you look at financial data, you expect to send and receive stuff in a fraction of a second. It should feel instantaneous otherwise it feels broken.

A popular system that lets you create realtime features is called Pub/Sub, as in publish-subscribe. As the name suggests, with that model, users publish and receive data through the same channel. Users who want to receive data in realtime establish a realtime connection saying that they want to receive new messages that are routed through that channel.

Whenever someone publishes a new message, the message is routed to subscribers as quickly as possible — ideally, the message arrives in a fraction of a second. Push notifications on your smartphone follow more or less the same logic, except that they eventually go through Google’s and Apple’s push notification services.

There are several realtime platform-as-a-service providers out there, including services developed by Amazon Web Services and Google Cloud. And yet, Ably thinks it has the best technology platform out there and can build a large, standalone realtime API-based startup.

Existing investors Triple Point, Digital Horizon, Forward Partners and MMC also participated in today’s funding round.

“We thought realtime data would underpin experiences instead of enhance them,” co-founder and CEO Matthew O’Riordan told me. Ably customers currently contact the startup at different pain points. They may be using different services for their realtime features. Or maybe it doesn’t scale properly.

A good example of that is CRM, sales and marketing startup HubSpot. “They had realtime features across all their products and they were struggling specifically with the chat feature,” O’Riordan said. HubSpot looked at Ably to solve that problem in particular. And they’re now using Ably for all their products, from analytics to live chat and updates.

Ably has built a global network of data centers so that it can route messages as efficiently as possible. Just like content delivery network (CDN) companies try to minimize latency, Ably routes messages based on latency.

The startup also promises redundancy and reliability with a self-healing network. If a data center goes down, your realtime features still operate as usual. You can also store messages in a traditional message queue in case a user is offline and you want to deliver a batch of messages later when they come back online.

Clients include virtual event company Hopin, Bloomberg, Verizon and Tennis Australia (Verizon is also TechCrunch’s parent company). There are also some big customers in the social media space but Ably can’t disclose the names of all its customers. They pay depending on usage, such as the number messages, concurrent connections and channels.

Overall, Ably reaches 250 million devices per month. It currently has 65 employees. With today’s funding round, it expects to hire another 125 employees by the end of 2022.

The company’s vision is straightforward. It wants to build an infrastructure company that becomes an essential part of the services that you use every day. Ably could become the realtime network that delivers messages from point A to point B as quickly and as reliably as possible.

India-based technology startup Salesken.ai has secured an exposed server that was spilling private and sensitive data on one of its customers, Byju’s, an education technology giant and India’s most valuable startup.

The server was left unprotected since at least June 14, according to historical data provided by Shodan, a search engine for exposed devices and databases. Because the server was without a password, anyone could access the data inside. Security researcher Anurag Sen found the exposed server, and asked TechCrunch for help in reporting it to the company.

The server was pulled offline a short time after we contacted Salesken.ai on Tuesday.

Salesken.ai provides customer relationship technology to companies like Byju’s to engage better with customers. The Bengaluru-based startup raised $8 million in Series A funding from Sequoia Capital India in 2020, two years after the company was founded.

Much of the data contained on the exposed server pertained to WhiteHat Jr., an online coding school for students in India and the U.S., which Byju’s bought for $300 million in 2020. Byju’s is currently valued at more than $16 billion after raising $1.5 billion earlier this year.

The server contained the names and classes taken by students, and email address and phone numbers of parents and teachers. The server also contained other data related to students, such as chat logs between parents — identified by their phone number — and WhiteHat Jr. staff, as well as comments recorded by teachers about their students.

The server also contained copies of emails containing codes to reset user accounts, and other internal Salesken.ai data.

Surga Thilakan, co-founder and chief executive at Salesken.ai, told TechCrunch the startup was “evaluating” the security incident, but did not dispute what kind of data was found on the exposed server..

“Our assessment suggests the exposed device appears to be a non-production, staging instance of one of our integration services having access to less than 1% of India based end-of-life sales logs for a fortnight,” said Thilakan. “Salesken.ai follows stringent data security norms and is certified under the highest standards of global security and safety. We have, in an abundance of caution, immediately severed access to the cloud device.”

Thilakan did not respond to a follow-up email from TechCrunch asking why real user data was stored in what the company claims is a “non-production, staging” server. The company also would not say if it has logs or any evidence to determine if data was accessed or downloaded as a result of the security lapse.

WhiteHat Jr. spokesperson Sameer Bajaj said the company is “currently communicating with Salesken.ai about the incident and will take appropriate action in accordance with our rigorous security policies.”

Sequoia Capital India has selected 23 early-stage startups for its fifth cohort of Surge, its accelerator program for India and Southeast Asia, at a time when dealflow activity is at its peak in the region.

The new cohort, Surge’s largest to date, have collectively raised $55 million, the storied investment firm said Wednesday. The cohort also includes 10 women founders, another record for the accelerator program which started its journey in March 2019.

The Surge program has enabled Sequoia Capital India — which has always backed early-stage startups but historically focused more on cutting checks for Series A and beyond rounds — to more aggressively identify promising startups while they are too young and increase the probability of broadening its portfolio with more winners, investors in the industry said.

And those odds have gotten much better in recent months. As Tiger Global and Falcon Edge begin to chase early-stage deals in India, both the firms have backed several Surge startups.

Sequoia said nearly 50% of startups from the first three cohorts have grown to raise their Series A financing rounds.

The Surge program is now “tried, tested and proven to support founders through strategic mentorship from some of the world’s best startups and business minds, hands-on company building support, and a community of founder-to-founder support,” said the investment firm, which employs over 30 people in advisory roles in the region.

Some investors also said Sequoia, which offers very aggressive terms and a plethora of resources (App Annie subscription, for instance) to startups in Surge, that the accelerator program has diminished the significance of Y Combinator in India. (Rajan Anandan, who spearheads Surge, told me earlier this year that he doesn’t see Y Combinator and Surge as rivals.)

The new cohort, several names of which TechCrunch scooped early this month, includes 13 startups that are building services in fintech, payments, communications, logistics, and SaaS sectors, Surge said.

“We are incredibly proud of all 23 companies who have joined Surge 05 and the founders who have forged their businesses in sectors that have seen tremendous tailwinds. These leaders have displayed grit, exceptional talent, and relentless purpose in shaping the world,” said Anandan, who prior to joining Sequoia Capital India as MD led Google’s business in India and Southeast Asia.

“At this inflection point of global regrowth, we are excited to be part of the journey of our founders and their companies, many of which we believe will grow into large, enduring businesses,” he added.

The new cohort features the following startups as well as one that is operating in stealth mode.

• Absolute is building a plant bioscience and AI-driven adaptive platform for precision agriculture that helps horticulture growers radically transform yields, grade and nutritional value of produce. The startup has also received an investment from Lets Venture.
• ADPList is attempting to “democratise” mentorship and make it accessible for everyone through a community platform where people can find, book and meet mentors around the world.
• ApnaKlub is an agent-led business-to-business wholesale platform for fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG). The startup aims to encourage and empower people to set up their own hyper-local micro-distribution businesses by providing them with better profit margins, access to a large assortment of brands and SKUs, and supply consistency.
• Belora produces clean, high-performance, vegan makeup — free from toxins and harmful ingredients. The startup, which has also secured investment from DSG Consumer Partners, says it wants to create makeup that doubles up as skincare, so that women can wear products that are not only dermatologically tested, but also good for their skin.
• Durianpay is building an integrated and comprehensive payments stack that enables businesses to grow and scale.
• Dyte is a developer-friendly real time audio and video calling software development kit (SDK). The startup, which has also secured investments from Nexus Venture Partners and Y Combinator, allows developers to integrate live video into their apps in interesting and innovative ways. The SDK is simple, offers integrations within hours, and has a large number of plug-ins and configurations. These configurations provide developers with a quick and efficient way to embed audio and video calling, AI video augmentation, and collaboration features.
• Gumlet provides a new-age media delivery infrastructure that provides low code or no-code integration plugins, which automates the entire media publishing pipeline. Developers all over the world use Gumlet to automatically provide the lowest size images and videos with the best resolution and performance.
• Locad is making multi-channel e-commerce fulfilment easier than ever by offering a distributed warehousing network, which reduces shipping time and costs by storing products closer to customers. The startup has also secured investments from Antler and others.
• Mailmodo is an email marketing platform that helps marketers create app-like experiences within emails and increase conversions.
• Mesh is a new-age people management platform that makes it easy for employees to manage goals, get timely feedback, and grow faster. Y Combinator Continuity fund and RTP Global have also invested in Mesh.
• Multiplier is a new-age employer of record that simplifies international hiring. It counts Golden Gate Ventures, MS&AD Ventures, Picus Capital among its investors.
• OneCode is an app that connects companies with sales agents, giving these agents access to sell the products and services to less tech-savvy buyers. The startup’s mission is to digitise 50 million sales agents across India, and bridge the gap between brands and potential buyers who may need in-person interactions and physical touch points before committing to a purchase. Nexus Venture Partners and WaterBridge Ventures have also invested in the startup.
• Powerplay is a mobile-first, vernacular construction site management app that enables project managers and workers to communicate and collaborate more effectively. The startup, also backed by Accel, helps them track their progress, deliverables, and payments across projects.
• Pankhuri is a social community platform where women can network, learn and shop online through live streaming, chat, and micro courses.
• RaRa Delivery is attempting to reimagine instant delivery for e-commerce in Indonesia through data driven logistics. It also counts 500 Startups among its investors.
• Revery is using game thinking to revolutionise wellness, and the team is on a mission to make wellness affordable and accessible to anyone with a mobile phone. The startup has also secured funds from GGV Capital and Pascal Capital.
• TWID (That’s What I Do) is a rewards-based payment network that enables customer reward or loyalty points to be used as a payment instrument. (Beenext is a co-investor.)
• Vah Vah! is a live, online vocational training platform that offers professional beauty courses.
• Vara is an easy-to-use and lightweight staff management platform for SMEs across Southeast Asia. It enables small companies to effortlessly manage their attendance and payroll. The startup counts RTP Global and a number of other firms among its investors.
• Veera Health is on a mission to help women lead healthier lives. Veera’s first offering is a digital therapeutics platform that helps women identify and navigate Polycystic Ovary Syndrome (PCOS), with a comprehensive offering of therapy, coaching and specialist support. Global Founders Capital, Harvard University, and Y Combinator have also backed Veera.
• Virtual Internships are redesigning internships for the 21st century workforce, mirroring the future of work.
• WATI helps companies have personalised conversations with customers at scale with an easy-to-use customer engagement software that’s built on WhatApp’s Business API.

Quizizz, an Indian startup that is making learning more interactive so that students find it compelling to spend more hours studying, said on Wednesday it has raised $31.5 million in a new financing round.

Tiger Global led the Series B financing round in the five-and-a-half-year-old startup. Yahoo co-founder Jerry Yang and existing investors Eight Roads Ventures, GSV Ventures, Nexus Venture Partners also participated in the new round.

Quizizz, which concluded its previous financing round in March this year, has raised $47 million to-date.

“When we were kids, it was so difficult to focus on studies. Our thesis has been that with kids now living in a world with so much distraction, there’s a need to make learning more interesting,” said Ankit Gupta, co-founder and chief executive of Quizizz, in an interview with TechCrunch.

Along with Deepak Cheenath, Quizizz’s other co-founder, Gupta started the startup’s journey in a non-profit school in Bangalore, where they built several prototypes. The same year — 2015 — the duo engaged closely with teachers and students in the U.S., and pivoted to Quizizz, said Gupta.

On Quizizz, teachers and the community develop gamified lessons for students. (Teachers don’t have to build these lessons. For the concepts that they want to explain to students, if lessons exist, many just use those instead. The platform has over 20 million quizzes today.)

These lessons have enabled students to find learning more engaging, said Gupta. The platform also enables teachers to identify in real-time students who are struggling with grasping any concept and then to address those gaps, he said.

The platform covers a range of subjects including computer science, english, mathematics, science, social studies, world languages, and creative arts.

Over the years, Quizizz has grown organically across the globe with many classrooms today using the platform, said Gupta. The platform is used by teachers in over 120 nations today with students answering more than 300 million questions on Quizizz each week. In the U.S., which is Quizizz’s largest market now, over 80% of K-12 schools use the platform, he said.

“During the pandemic, Quizziz made the transition to teaching online seamless. Now that we’re back in the building, I’ve used it almost exclusively. Making, finding, and altering lessons using Quizizz has become almost a hobby for me,” said Rory Roberts, a math teacher at Brigantine Community School, in a prepared statement.

“This week, we conducted user-testing with teachers in California, saw a video of students cheering on their classmates in an auditorium in Kenya, and got a thank you note from a group of teachers wearing Quizizz branded t-shirts in Indonesia. We’re incredibly proud of the role our growing team, and teacher community, have played in this movement,” said Quizizz’s Cheenath.

The startup plans to deploy the fresh capital to expand its team across both the U.S. and India to keep up with its growth. It is also looking to form partnerships to accelerate its international expansion.

Toca Football, a nine-year-old, Costa Mesa, Ca.-based company that operates 14 sports centers across the U.S. that are focused on soccer training, has raised $40 million in Series E funding to roughly double the number of facilities that are now up and running in the U.S., as well as to open a site in the U.K. that CEO Yoshi Maruyama describes as a “highly themed game-experiences-based dining and entertainment facility focused on soccer training.”

Maruyama knows a thing or two about building destinations to which people gravitate. Before joining Toca — which was founded by the American former soccer player Eddie Lewis (“toca” refers to the first touch of the ball in soccer) — Maruyama spent six years as the global head of location-based entertainment for Dreamworks. He spent 14 years before that as an SVP with Universal Parks & Resorts.

Indeed, he was brought into Toca in 2019 to transform it from a manufacturing business that sells Major League Soccer teams a ball-tossing machine that Lewis had developed, to the services business it has become.

On its face, its new model seems like a pretty smart one, given soccer’s growing popularity in the U.S. According to Statista, the number of participants in U.S. high school soccer programs recorded an all-time high in the 2018/19 season, with more than 850,000 playing the sport across the country.

But Toca isn’t built just for kids, even if kids — and their parents –are its primary customers. According to Maruyama, there are several populations that are coming to its various centers throughout the day. In the morning, the centers feature a curriculum for children up to age six to introduce them to soccer; the afternoons feature largely one-on-one soccer training programs where Toca is able to employ its touch trainer; and during the evenings, Toca operates a leagues business for both children and adults.

Some of the centers are huge, by the way. Among Toca’s newest sites, for example, in Naperville, Illinois, outside of Chicago, it has built a 95,000-square-foot facility that features four indoor, full-size soccer fields, as well as one-on-one individual training spaces. (Maruyama suggests the company has been able to take advantage of a depressed commercial real estate market over the last year or so.)

Little wonder that investors see a big opportunity potentially.

The newest round of funding for Toca comes from earlier investors WestRiver Group, RNS TOCA Partners, and D2 Futbol Investors; they were joined by new investors, including angel investor Jared Smith, the co-founder and former COO of Qualtrics.

The company — which plans to expand into Asia as quickly as possible (China has been mandated by the country’s leadership to become “a first-class football superpower” by 2050) —  has now raised $105 million in total funding.

As I’ve taken to online grocery shopping over the pandemic, I’ve always wondered why supermarkets didn’t offer simple ‘recipe’ features that would have automatically collected items for a homemade meal. It seemed an opportunity missed. But it is missed no more.

Lollipop AI, the new British online grocery marketplace, is launching its public beta today to do that, and it’s been created by a serial UK entrepreneur who was there at the start of successful UK startups Osper, Monzo and Curve.

Founder and CEO Tom Foster-Carter has envisaged a platform allowing people to build meal plans from recipes, assembling the ingredients automatically into their shopping basket, and suggesting remaining household essentials. He says could well help with health goals, improve culinary skills and minimize food waste. Built as a marketplace, it will be partnering with Sainsbury’s and BBC Good Food with more partners and fulfillment will be completed by retail partners. The business model will be taking a small commission from retail partners, allowing selected advertising, e.g. from CPG brand owners, and a Paid Premium tier later this year.

The site will be free to use, while a premium tier is planned. The first ten thousand Beta testers to sign up to the waitlist will be offered access to premium features “for life”, says the startup, which will offer prices at the same rate as normal supermarkets.

Foster-Carter, who had the idea after having a baby and realizing he was spending hours trying to use a normal supermarket, says the approach will save several hours a week for the average household. (We will briefly overlook the fact that a man had to create a site like this after doing the weekly shop…). Lollipop claims 80% of households spend over an hour a week meal-planning and online grocery shopping.

The founding team includes former employees of Monzo, Farmdrop, Amazon, Sainsbury’s and HelloFresh, such as cofounders Chris Parsons and Ib Warnerbring.

Although Foster-Carter is coy about how much he has raised for this approach, he says he has raised a pre-seed round backed by JamJar Investments, Speedinvest, and a “raft of grocery/technology big hitters” including Ian Marsh (former UK GM of HelloFresh) and former leadership and founders of online grocers in the UK and abroad plus ‘super-angels’ Charles Songhurst and Ed Lando.

In particular, the site is likely to appeal to people looking to lose weight, as meal planning would be simpler, and may even have an impact on recipe-box startups.

Lollipop is not alone in its ambitions. Jupiter.co in the US bills itself as “groceries on autopilot”; Jow is recipe-led shopping, as is Side Chef; while Cooklist is a meal-planner + cooking support, also in the US.

Foster-Carter told me: “It’s a marketplace so we could partner with traditional supermarkets (Sainbury’s, Tescos, Waitrose etc) + online retailers (Ocado, Amazon), direct to farm / organic (Riverford, Farmdrop), mission-led single component (Oddbox, Milk & More, etc); recipe boxes (Gousto, Hello Fresh, Mindful Chef etc); and rapid delivery (Gorillas, Getir, Weezy, etc).”

He said: “This is just the start… The plan is to be the single place you go to for all your food needs – we’ll enable you to order your Deliveroo or restaurant kit (e.g. Dishpatch) from us. Groceries are delivered by our partners and then when it’s time to cook you’ll be able to use a cooking companion app (due out next month). In the future you’ll be able to improve your cooking skills through Lollipop.”

Few players have nailed the ability to buy a lot of items (50-100+) really fast, not even Amazon – this might be Lollipop’s USP, if it can crack it.

 

Listen, it’s probably not the best sign when a show feels like it’s running out of steam on its first day. Mobile World Congress’ opening salvo was headlined by Samsung in an event that touched on some partnerships and spent equal time teasing an upcoming event where it will actually launch some hardware. It’s hard to get too down on the GSMA, and I really ought to preface all of these by reiterating that – even in a normal year – running an event is hard as hell. Canceling its flagship show last year had to be gut-wrenching, and deciding to go forward with this one must have also been – albeit for dramatically different reasons?

It’s not like the show didn’t come with some wins. What’s that? Elon Musk videoed in? That’s a pretty massive get by any measure, with all of the standard “whatever you think about the guy” preambles. Love him or hate, you’ve heard about him and probably have extremely strong feelings about the dude, one way or another.

The High Priest of Dogeking beamed in to talk SpaceX StarLink. “To be totally frank, we are losing money on that terminal right now,” Musk said in the interview. “That terminal costs us more than $1,000, so obviously I’m subsidizing the cost of the terminal.” Good thing he’s got deep pockets.

He promised a new version of the company’s satellite next year, “which will be significantly more capable.”

Huawei thus far has focused much more on networking than consumer – it’s important to caveat this by adding that MWC is as much, if not more, a networking show, in spite of all of the press that tends to focus on consumer device launches. The company launched a bunch of 5G networking hardware, including several MIMO products.

Speaking of networks, I totally forgot to include this bit from TechCrunch parent co (you know, for now). Verizon trotted out a bunch of robots with 5G branding. The company was making a point about the importance of cellular for future robotics communication.

Here’s CSO Rima Qureshi, quoted by Reuters, “5G will make it possible for robots to connect with other robots and devices of all kinds in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Let’s be honest, though, mostly robots make for cool stage fodder. From what I can tell, the Boston Dynamics-esque quadruped was this bot from Ghost Robotics, which Verizon also trotted out (well, it trotted itself out, I suppose) at CES in January:

Given the choice, would I have put on an in-person event in Barcelona in the summer of 2021? No. Nuh-uh. No way. Did the GSMA feel like they had a choice financially or otherwise? That’s a much more difficult question to answer. When you’re a company that runs on events and partnerships, even canceling a single big show is a shock to the system.

I’m going back and forth on whether I’ll be doing any more of these roundups as the show progresses through Thursday. Definitely if some more interesting stuff shows up, or if there’s like video of Elon hoverboarding through the sparsely populated convention center halls or something. But I’m not holding my breath.

 

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Hello and welcome to Daily Crunch for June 29, 2021. Have you ever wanted to ditch civilization and move to the woods, but still be able to work? We have good news if that’s you. Below you’ll find lots more, including Facebook’s latest product offering and how one startup wants to save bees. Enjoy! — Alex

The TechCrunch Top 3

• Duolingo is going public! Well-known edtech unicorn Duolingo is going public. TechCrunch has an overview of the IPO and a deeper dive into the company’s business health. Based on traffic to our coverage on the matter since last night, ya’ll are really into learning languages. Also make sure to check out the Duolingo EC-1.
• Facebook launches newsletters: Say hello to Bulletin, Facebook’s new newsletter service. Competing with Substack, Twitter’s Revu and other services, Facebook signed up a Boomer-friendly list of initial authors including Malcolm Gladwell. The social giant has a history of testing in-house versions of products that are successful externally. We’ll have to wait and see if Bulletin manages to survive on its own merit.
• SpaceX plans to spend billions on Starlink: According to Elon Musk, SpaceX is losing money on early Starlink connector kits. Starlink is the space company’s low-orbit satellite network that could bring about global internet connectivity. Per TechCrunch reporting of Musk’s comments, “SpaceX’s overall investment in the project could be between $5 billion-$10 billion initially and as much as $30 billion over time.” For the sake of freelancers everywhere, let’s hope the tech shakes out to match the investment.

Startups/VC

Up top today in our roundup of recent startup news is Beeflow. We’re putting it at the top of the list because (1) It’s about bees and (2) It’s called Beeflow. What’s not to love? Per Jordan Crook, the startup may have an answer to the decimation of the global bee population. And it might make money to boot.

Now, the rest of the news:

• Europe’s early-stage market is on fire: That’s the takeaway from a recent TechCrunch dig into the continent’s venture capital trade. So is Latin America’s and the United States’. In brief, the regional startup zones of the world are becoming increasingly blurred thanks to Zoom deal-making; what was once true in one place may now be the case in every hub.
• Zomato to drop $100M on Grofer: The Indian tech scene is busy these days, with Manish Singh reporting that IPO-headed food-delivery giant Zomato intends to invest $100 million in online grocer Grofer. Grofer would become a unicorn in the transaction.
• SentinelOne could be worth $10 billion in its IPO: That’s the latest on the SentinelOne public debut, which we’ve looked at here and dug into the pricing of here. The cybersecurity company’s IPO could help kick off a hot third quarter for IPOs more generally, especially at the prices at which it is set to debut.
• $10M to teach soft skills with VR: That’s the latest on Virti, which wants to turn “a lot of subjectively assessed skills into more objective and measurable” outputs. VR is cool, and soft skills matter. Let’s see what their union can bring. Please, no “Black Mirror” jokes.
• Givingli raises $3M for greeting card tech: Not every venture capital round is large. Some are small enough to fit into an envelope. That’s the case with Givingli’s latest round, which should give the digital card and gifting app more room to build out its service.

And I would be remiss to not mention that I covered venture capital rounds this morning from co-op and Arrows, along with news regarding Acceleprise’s rebrand.

How VCs can get the most out of co-investing alongside LPs

In a recent private equity survey, 80% of respondents said their co-investments with people outside traditional VC firms outperformed their PE fund investments.

Alternative investors are highly motivated, and because they’re seeking higher returns than are generally available in public markets, they are less daunted by risk. In return, they benefit from less expensive fee structures and develop close ties with VCs, enlarging the talent pool as they build investment skills.

These relationships have direct benefits for VCs as well, such as more flexibility with diversification and consolidated decision-making power.

“With the right deal structure, deal selection and deal investigation, co-investors can significantly increase their returns,” says C5 Capital Managing Partner William Kilmer, who wrote an Extra Crunch post for VCs considering an alternative path.

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

Big Tech Inc.

Turning from the smaller upstarts to the megagiants, it’s been a good week to be a Big Tech company. Facebook crossed the $1 trillion market cap threshold, though it dipped back under the magic number this afternoon. Here’s what else is going on from the Bigs:

• Shopify cuts its cut to 0%: Shopify will charge zero for developers’ first million in revenue that they make on its application marketplace. The move fits into a larger trend of app stores lowering their cuts as Apple fights tooth and nail to avoid doing the same with its own application emporium. The Shopify news is probably more aimed at e-commerce rival Amazon than Apple, but the move still gently undercuts Cupertino’s argument that it deserves around a third of all commerce that happens on iOS.
• AI developers are coming: News out today from Microsoft’s GitHub product is notable, with the sub-org announcing an AI-powered tool that “suggests code as you type.” GitHub teamed up with OpenAI to build the tool. For beginners, the coding service could prove to be super freaking neat.

TechCrunch Experts: Growth Marketing

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