Author: azeeadmin

JW Player, a very early mover in the market for online video technology — it powered YouTube’s first video player, before Google acquired it and it built its own — has long been profitable through a business model of providing one-to-many video streaming tools to publishers and others that want to bring video into their own online experiences, without building the technology from the ground up, nor being beholden to companies that might themselves profit from the videos and the customer data that is generated through video views.

Now, after a year of strong growth on the back of the bigger boom in online video from Covid-19, the New York-based company is announcing a big funding round — $100 million — to expand its tech, and to be where it believes video is going next.

The capital is coming from a single investor, LLR Partners, and while the JW Player’s valuation is not being disclosed, we understand it’s not quite yet at $1 billion, but fast approaching it. It comes on the heels of the company charting some massive growth, despite being a relatively quiet player in the industry.

Dave Otten, the CEO and co-founder of the company (which is named after another co-founder, Jeroen Wijering, who developed the initial technology), told TechCrunch in an interview that the company’s video streaming traffic by nearly 200% over the last year, with live streaming growing 400% in that period.

There are now over 600,000 applications and sites running video powered by JW Player, with about 10,000 of those premium users; the rest use its software for free, Otten said.

This is enough of a balance that the company has been profitable for a number of years, he said. And in cases where the software is being used for free, JW Player is getting “paid” in a  Some of the many customers using its tools include Sesame Street, TIME, Hearst, Insider, IMDB and the Chelsea Football Club.

It’s a long way away from JW’s early days powering YouTube — screen shot of how it looked above — but contrary to so many examples of early movers being some of the slowest to innovate later on, JW is hoping that the fact that it was a first mover in video does not mean it will be the last to anticipate what is coming in the future.

The current product challenge for JW Player mirrors that of its customers: monetization.

Just as companies have increasingly started to create paywalls around their written content, they are looking to do the same for their video catalogues, too, and JW Player wants to be their partner for this. That will include more investments into subscription services, as well as a a new set of tools for personalizing videos and providing advertising opportunities by way of the extensive data that it has amassed and continues to gather about video usage.

The company has a strong card to play in its hand for the latter business: those who use the free version of JW Player “pay” the company by way of helping it gather lots of insights into how videos are watched.

Another area that the company will be doing more is in the area of live and on-demand video. In May, it acquired Vualto, a UK-based specialist in these areas that also builds DRM solutions, which it has already integrated into its platform.

Video now accounts for a whopping 80% of all online traffic, with people typically spending more than two hours days watching it. While some of that is inevitably going big platforms like YouTube, Facebook, social media platforms like Instagram, TikTok and Snapchat, there remains a big opportunity for others, aided by the likes of JW, to carve out spaces for themselves in the mix.

“JW Player has been at the forefront of digital video innovation ever since founder Jeroen Wijering created YouTube’s original video player in 2008. Today, the company offers the most comprehensive technology, advertising and data analytics platform in the digital video ecosystem,” said David Reuter, Partner at LLR Partners, in a statement. “We look forward to partnering with the JW Player team as they expand their platform and continue to elevate the way brands can host, stream and monetize video.”

Electric propulsion developer Orbion Space Technology has raised $20 million in a Series B funding round, which it says it will use to scale production capacity of its Aurora propulsion system.

The Michigan-based startup manufactures Hall effect plasma thrusters for use in small and cube satellites. Thrusters are used throughout the lifespan of a satellite (or any object in space that needs to maintain its orbit, like the space station) to adjust orbital altitude, avoid collisions, and de-orbit the craft once it has reached the end of its useful life. Hall thrusters use a magnetic field to ionize a propellant and produce plasma.

While they have long been used in space, this type of thruster has mostly been too expensive for small satellite operators. Orbion says it has created a cost-effective production capacity to meet the growing demand of startups and developers launching to low Earth orbit. Orbion CEO Brad King said in a statement that the company considered contract manufacturers but ultimately chose a vertically integrated manufacturing model. Now, the company says it has outgrown its existing manufacturing space.

The company is facing “unprecedented market demand” for its Aurora system, King said. With the boom of the so-called new space economy, driven in part by the decreased costs of processors, components and even launch, it’s no surprise that there’s been a concurrent uptick in demand for efficient in-space propulsion systems.

Image Credits: Orbion Space Technology (opens in a new window)

The company had previously raised a $9.2 million Series A in August 2019. Since that time, the company secured a research partnership with the U.S. Department of Defense that’s testing the resiliency of American space systems. Orbion also landed a contract with satellite manufacturer Blue Canyon Technologies last September.

This most recent funding round was led by the US-India VC firm Inventus Capital Partners, with additional participation from Material Impact, Beringea and Wakestream Ventures.

“The space game is changing,” Inventus Capital Partners investor Kanwal Rekhi said in a statement. “Large satellites are being replaced by a multitude of nano-satellites; just like the PCs replaced mainframes. Orbion is providing these nano-satellites maneuverability to get into more precise orbits and stay there longer.”

Volvo Cars and Luminar Technologies are beefing up their partnership. The two companies said Thursday that Luminar’s autonomous driving stack – a combination of hardware and software that includes lidar sensors and a proprietary perception system – will be standard on Volvo’s forthcoming flagship electric SUV.

Luminar had previously announced the production deal with Volvo last May. But at that time, Luminar’s stack was going to be optional on the flagship vehicle — an upgrade that would add on cost. Now, it will be built into each vehicle as a matter of course.

However, customers will still have to pay if they want to take advantage of the Highway Pilot functionality. That capability, which will be available only when the vehicle is driving on a highway, puts the driver out of the loop — they won’t even have to actively monitor the vehicle, as is common in some systems already on the road today, a source familiar with the technology told TechCrunch. It’s the highest capability of autonomy that the system offers, and if customers want it, they will have to pay for it.

That functionality will be activated wirelessly when the conditions are verified to be safe, Luminar said in a news release. What customers won’t have to pay for is a suite of safety capabilities, like automatic emergency braking and lane-keeping, that target the most common cause of car accidents.

The deal is undoubtedly a major boon for Luminar. In addition to higher production volumes, the company will also benefit from the many thousands of driving miles its system will be exposed to — valuable data that it can feed back into its autonomous driving stack. The system will also be capable of wireless over-the-air updates, so drivers should benefit as it grows ‘smarter’ over time.

Volvo did not reveal how much the Highway Pilot add-on will cost, nor whether it will be available in a subscription model or as a one-time purchase. But the carmaker did say that all vehicles will be “hardware ready” for unsupervised autonomous driving once it’s available.

A lot of startups were built to help people make all-cash offers on homes with the purpose of gaining an edge against other buyers, especially in ultra-competitive markets. 

Accepti.inc is a Denver-based company that is attempting to create a new category in real estate technology. To help scale its digital mortgage lending platform, the company announced today that it has secured $90 million in debt and equity – with $78 million in debt and $12 million in equity. Signal Fire led the equity portion of its financing, which also included participation from existing seed investors Y Combinator and DN Capital.

Accept.inc describes itself as an iLender, or a “technology-enabled lender” that gives people a way to submit all-cash offers on a home upon qualifying for a mortgage.

Using its platform, a buyer gets qualified first and then can start looking for homes that fall at or under the amount he or she is approved for. They can purchase a more expensive home, but any amount above what they are approved for would have to come out of pocket. Historically, most buyers don’t know that they will have to pay out of pocket until they’ve made an offer on a specific home and an appraisal comes under the amount of the price they are paying for a home. In those cases, the buyer has to cough up the difference out of pocket. With Accept.inc., its execs tout, buyers know upfront how much they are approved for and can spend on a new home “so there are no surprises later.”

SignalFire Founding Partner and CTO Ilya Kirnos describes Accept.inc as “the first and only iLender.”

He points out that since it is a lender, Accept.inc doesn’t make its money by charging buyers fees like some others in the all-cash offer space.

“Unlike ‘iBuyers’ or ‘alternative iBuyers,’ Accept.inc fronts the cash to buy a house and then makes money off mortgage origination and title, meaning sellers, homebuyers and their agents pay no additional cost for the service,” he told TechCrunch.

IBuyers instead buy homes from sellers who signed up online, make a profit by often fixing up and selling those homes and then helping people purchase a different home with all cash. They also make money by charging transaction fees. A slew of companies operate in the space including established players such as Opendoor and Zillow and newer players such as Homelight.

Image credit: Accept.inc. Left to right: Co-founders Adam Pollack, Nick Friedman and Ian Perrex.

Since its 2016 inception, Accept.inc says it has helped thousands of buyers, agents and sellers close on “hundreds of millions of dollars” in homes. The company saw ”14x” growth in 2020 and from June 2020 to June 2021, it achieved “10x” growth in terms of the size of its team and number of transactions and revenue, according to CEO and co-founder Adam Pollack. Accept.inc wants to use its new capital to build on that momentum and meet demand.

Pollack and Nick Friedman met while in college and started building Accept.inc with the goal of “turning every offer into a cash offer.” The pair essentially “failed for two years,” half-jokes Pollack.

“We basically became an encyclopedia of 1,000 ways the idea of helping people make all-cash offers wouldn’t work,” he said.

The team went through Y Combinator in the winter of 2019 and that’s when they created the iLender concept. In the iLender model, the company uses its cash to buy a house for buyers. Once the loan with Accept.inc is ready to close, the company sells back the house to the buyer “at no additional cost or fees.”

“Basically what we learned through those two years is that you have to vertically integrate all of your core competencies, and you can’t rely on third parties to own or manage your special sauce for you,” Pollack told TechCrunch. “We also realized that if you’re going to build a cash offer for anyone who could afford a mortgage, you’ve got to make it a full bona fide cash offer that closes in three days as opposed to a better version of what existed. And you have to own that, and take the risk that comes with it and be comfortable with that.”

The benefits of their model, the pair say, is that buyers get to be cash buyers, sellers can close in as little as 32 hours, and agents “get a guaranteed commission check.” 

“Our mission is that everyone should have an equal chance at homeownership,” Friedman said. “We not only want to level the playing field, we want to create a new standard.”

Buyers using Accept.inc win 6-7 times more frequently, the company claims. With its new capital, It also plans to double its team of 90 and enter new markets outside of its home base of Denver.

SignalFire Partner Chris Scoggins believes that Accept.inc is different from other lenders in that its focus is on “winning the home, not just servicing the loan, with a business model that’s 10x more capital-efficient than other players in the market.

“The team is driven…to level the playing field for homebuyers who today lose out against all-cash offers from home-flippers and wealthy individuals,” he added. “We see an enormous opportunity for Accept.inc to become the backbone of the future of mortgage lending.”

It’s no surprise that the coronavirus pandemic has changed the way we shop, especially when it comes to groceries. Grocery delivery apps experienced a record number of downloads in March 2020, and by the following month, Walmart Grocery (which is now integrated into the Walmart app) surpassed Amazon as the No. 1 shopping app on both Google Play and the App Store. But even as pandemic restrictions have eased, consumers are still using ordering groceries for delivery or pickup more frequently than they were pre-pandemic.

As Walmart’s grocery delivery services have continued to boom, posing competition to companies like Amazon and Instacart, the tech that Walmart uses has expanded too. Today, Walmart shared information about how it’s training its AI to make smarter substitutions in online grocery orders.

Bringing this technology to grocery delivery isn’t novel by any means. Last May, Walmart reported how it used to AI to determine eligibility for its Express delivery service, which was brand new at the time. A year into the United States’ coronavirus outbreak, Instacart engineers reported that they crunched “petabytes daily to predict what will be on grocery shelves and even how long it will take to find parking.”

So what makes Walmart’s AI for grocery substitutions unique? According to Srini Venkatesan, an Executive Vice President at Walmart Global Tech, it’s the sheer quantity of data that Walmart can use to teach its AI. Over 200 million people shop at Walmart in-store and online each week for more than 150,000 different grocery products. The AI uses that data to predict consumer behavior, preferences, and needs.

“The tech we built uses deep learning AI to consider hundreds of variables — size, type, brand, price, aggregate shopper data, individual customer preference, current inventory and more — in real time to determine the best next available item,” explained Venkatesan. “It then preemptively asks the customer to approve the substituted item or let us know they don’t want it, an important signal that’s fed back into our learning algorithms to improve the accuracy of future recommendations.”

Image Credits: Walmart

Rather than asking a Personal Shopper to make a quick decision about how to substitute for cherry yogurt (do you get a different flavor from the same brand, the same flavor from a more expensive brand, and so on), the AI makes that choice for them. Walmart started developing this algorithm last year, and in the time since, customer acceptance of substitutions has improved.

“We were at about 90% before this algorithm rolled out,” said Venkatesan. “We are now around 97% to 98%.”

In the last year, Walmart doubled its number of Personal Shoppers to over 170,000 workers. About 3,750 stores are enabled for order pickup, and 3,000 stores are enabled for delivery, which covers 68% of the population. Earlier this year, Walmart dropped the $35 order minimum on its Express delivery service, a competitor to Amazon’s Prime Now.

BMW’s Silicon Valley-based venture capital arm is investing in Kodiak Robotics, a company that develops autonomous trucking technology. 

Kodiak will use the funds to build out a safety case for its self-driving tech stack so it can more quickly commercialize. It will also work on hiring fresh talent and expanding its truck fleet, with a stated goal of at least doubling the number of vehicles it operates each year. The startup currently has 10 trucks in rotation between its commercial route in Texas and its test pilot in Mountain View, California. 

The terms of the deal were not disclosed. BMW i Ventures usually invests in companies that can provide solutions to BMW’s current and future business, but Kodiak’s CEO and co-founder Don Burnette told TechCrunch that BMW’s investment was purely financial and not strategic, meaning there is currently no technical partnership between the two. 

This new investment comes just a week after tire-maker Bridgestone announced a minority stake in Kodiak. The financials behind that deal were not revealed either. To date, Kodiak has publicly announced $40 million in funding from its Series A, and Burnette says the startup has had several additional investments since then. 

Burnette also shared the company’s plans to achieve driverless operations at scale for less than 10% of what Waymo has publicly raised to date – $5.7 billion – and less than 25% of TuSimple’s total existing fundraise – about $1.94 billion, including the money it raised through its IPO. That leaves us with a number roughly around $500 million. 

“That’s the total amount of money that we think we need to get to driverless, and that’s because we think we’ve been a much more efficient company up until this point, and we will continue to be much more efficient going forward,” said Burnette. 

The BMW i Ventures funding will eventually make up part of Kodiak’s Series B. With this latest investment, the company isn’t trying to further develop its self-driving capabilities or features, but rather it wants to build out its safety case and prove that its system can handle the road with no driver on board, says Burnette. 

“We are building toward a Level 4 autonomy system, but we still have a driver in the seat that’s actually monitoring our system at all times,” said Burnette. “Today, we are technically a Level 2 system, which is true for just about everybody else out there.”

Vehicles with a human driver supervising operations such as steering, brake and acceleration support, as well as things like lane centering and adaptive cruise control fit under the Society of Automobile Engineer’s (SAE) definition of Level 2 autonomy. Level 4 means the vehicle can handle all aspects of driving in certain conditions without human intervention. 

Kodiak says it’s made progress. In January it announced its Kodiak Driver achieved “disengagement-free deliveries” (meaning the autonomous system didn’t have to be switched off for safety reasons) during a commercial route from Dallas to Houston. The company has been running this route out of its Dallas testing and operations facility for two years, and says it’s now achieved a level of maturity where the system can handle anything the highway throws at it. 

“We’re doing really complex and advanced maneuvers, not just handling obvious things like merges and cut-ins and heavy traffic, but also more nuanced challenges like identifying vehicles that are pulled over on the side of the road,” said Burnette. “Our system can automatically identify that and then slow down as required by law, or nudge away from that object to give it more space. It can also consider making a lane change if a lane is available, a way to give even more clearance to the stalled vehicle on the side, and this is exactly how humans drive.”

To get to the point where Kodiak can prove its tech is actually safer than a human driver, and thus suitable for operating commercially at scale, the startup has to build up its total miles driven in simulated environments, structured testing on a private closed track, and in real world driving. 

Burnette says Kodiak is the only company that doesn’t designate one type of sensor as ‘primary,’ and rather takes a comprehensive approach, meaning it’s not a lidar-first or vision-first company. Tesla’s head of AI Andrej Karpathy recently revealed the company’s new supercomputer which takes a vision-only approach, but Burnette fundamentally disagrees with that method. 

“We believe that each of these different modalities have strengths and weaknesses, and our objective is to take advantage of those strengths and cover the weaknesses with other modalities, and so we’ve created a sensor fusion algorithm that allows us to consider which sensors are advantageous in the moments where they give us the most usable information,” said Burnette.

Kodiak doesn’t use HD mapping either, so its trucks see in real time on the road, which allows the Kodiak Driver to be flexible when it comes to changing road conditions or environments. The system is trained using data collected by Kodiak’s trucks, as well as on scenarios devised by its engineers, and that data is auto-labeled using Scale AI, which is one of the ways Kodiak is able to keep down costs, says Burnette. 

Kodiak’s team hails from Google’s original self-driving team, Uber, Lyft and other notable tech companies. Burnette says BMW i Ventures’ investment in the company came after a thorough vetting process in which the firm sent over their autonomous driving experts and dug into the team’s expertise and tech.

Deliveroo has had another win in the UK courts, beating back an appeal by the IWGB union which has sought for years to challenge the gig platform over couriers’ rights but has continued to fail to overturn the company’s classification of riders as self-employed.

The latest appeals court ruling is the fourth judgment in the UK that supports Deliveroo’s contention that its riders are self-employed, following earlier judgments by the Central Arbitration Committee and two at the High Court.

The on-demand food delivery platform operates a different gig model to ride-hailing giant Uber — which has, by contrast, failed to prevent UK courts from judging its drivers to be workers not self-employed contractors.

Deliveroo, for example, allows riders to use a substitute to fulfil a shift with only limited restrictions on the practice. And the interpretation of how exactly employment law applies typically hinges on exactly such nuanced details as the level of flexibility being offered to platform workers.

Despite a string of legal loses against Deliveroo over the years, the IWGB did not give up its fight. Most recently honing in on the issue of collective bargaining, and seeking to challenge the platform giant’s stance under the European Convention on Human Rights — by arguing riders have a legal right to form or join a union.

It hasn’t had much success with this line of argument against Deliveroo either, though.

And today the UK Court of Appeal dismissed its latest appeal — ruling that riders do not fall under the scope of the trade union freedom right set out in the European Convention of Human Rights.

Although the Court did suggest that riders do fall under “the more general right of freedom of association under article 11 [of the ECoHR]”.

In conclusion the judges also make a point of noting that other gig economy legal challenges may have a different outcome, writing that: “It may be thought that those in the gig economy have a particular need of the right to organise as a trade union. So I quite accept that there may be other cases where, on different facts and with a broader range of available arguments, a different result may eventuate.”

The IWGB’s president, Alex Marshall, seized on this element of the ruling — commenting in a statement:

“The judgment recognises that riders would benefit from organising collectively to represent their interests and admits the conclusion reached in the judgment might seem counter intuitive. We will now consider our legal position, but one thing is for sure: We will continue to grow in numbers and fight on the streets until Deliveroo give these key worker heroes the pay and conditions they more than deserve.”

In further remarks, Marshall attacked Deliveroo’s stance toward riders — claiming it has sought to “silence” their voices and deny them opportunities to negotiate better terms:

“Deliveroo couriers have been working on the frontline of the pandemic and whilst being applauded by the public and even declared heroes by their employer, they have been working under increasingly unfair and unsafe working conditions. The reward they have received for their Herculean effort? Deliveroo continuing to invest thousands of pounds in litigation to silence workers’ voices and deny them the opportunity to negotiate better terms and conditions. A recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism revealed riders were making as little as £2 per hour. Is this the kind of pay workers would accept if they really were their own boss? It appears that when Deliveroo talk about flexibility and being your own boss, it is talking about the flexibility of choosing when to make poverty wages and work in unsafe conditions.”

In a statement welcoming the appeal court ruling, Deliveroo claimed the contrary — saying:

“Today is good news for Deliveroo riders and marks an important milestone. UK courts have now tested and upheld the self-employed status of Deliveroo riders four times.

“Our message to riders is clear. We will continue to back your right to work the way you want and we will continue to listen to you and respond to the things that matter to you most.

“Deliveroo’s model offers the genuine flexibility that is only compatible with self-employment, providing riders with the work they tell us they value. Those campaigning to remove riders’ flexibility do not speak for the vast majority of riders and seek to impose a way of working that riders do not want. Deliveroo will continue to campaign for companies like ours to be able to offer the full flexibility of self employment along with greater benefits and more security.”

Visa has announced plans to acquire Tink for €1.8 billion, or $2.15 billion at today’s exchange rate. Tink has been a leading fintech startup in Europe focused on open banking application programming interface (API).

Today’s move comes a few months after Visa abandoned its acquisition of Plaid, another popular open banking startup. Originally, Visa planned to spend $5.3 billion to acquire the American startup. But the company had to call off the acquisition after running into a regulatory wall.

Tink offers a single API so that customers can connect to bank accounts from their own apps and services. For instance, you can leverage Tink’s API to access account statements, initiate payments, fetch banking information and refresh this data regularly.

While banks and financial institutions now all have to offer open banking interfaces due to EU’s Payment Services Directive PSD2, there’s no single standard. Tink integrates with 3,400 banks and financial institutions.

App developers can use the same API call to interact with bank accounts across various financial institutions. As you may have guessed, it greatly simplifies the adoption of open banking features.

300 banks and fintech startups use Tink’s API to access third-party bank information — clients include PayPal, BNP Paribas, American Express and Lydia. Overall, Tink covers 250 million bank customers across Europe.

Based in Stockholm, Sweden, Tink operations should continue as usual after the acquisition. Visa plans to retain the brand and management team.

According to Crunchbase data, Tink has raised over $300 million from Dawn Capital, Eurazeo, HMI Capital, Insight Partners, PayPal Ventures, Creades, Heartcore Capital and others.

“For the past ten years we have worked relentlessly to build Tink into a leading open banking platform in Europe, and we are incredibly proud of what the whole team at Tink has created together,” Tink co-founder and CEO Daniel Kjellén said in a statement. “We have built something incredible and at the same time we have only scratched the surface.”

“Joining Visa, we will be able to move faster and reach further than ever before. Visa is the perfect partner for the next stage of Tink’s journey, and we are incredibly excited about what this will bring to our employees, customers and for the future of financial services.”

Remittances — specifically when people in developed countries send money to family or friends in emerging markets — continues to be a huge lever to help those in more challenging economies survive and improve their lot. Today, a startup that has built a remittance platform that it believes is the most economically sympathetic and useful to the people who use those services the most is announcing some funding to continue growing.

Taptap Send, which provides a “free” mobile money transfer service from eight countries to 15 others, has raised $13.4 million, money that it will be using to continue expanding its scope and the services that it provides to its customers.

The 15 receiver countries include some of the poorest countries in the world that are the hardest to service, plus emerging markets with some of the poorest populations — DR Congo, Mali, and Madagascar among them — while the eight originator countries include some of the most common places to which people from these countries emigrate — United Kingdom, Belgium, Canada, France and Italy among them.

The Series A was co-led by Canaan Partners and Reid Hoffman, with other unnamed investors also participating.

There is a reason that a lot of companies launch and build services in countries like the U.S. or regions like Western Europe: there is a lot of money there, and specifically consumers and businesses with the kind of income that allows them to invest in new technologies and simply to do more. Of course, that doesn’t mean that other, less wealthy demographics don’t exist, or don’t also need new technology; but building for them is usually less lucrative and more risky.

Taptap Send is among the startups that is trying to approach the promise of tech with this in mind, and with a view to bucking that trend. The company’s business model works by way of charging no commission or any other fees for transfers, instead making a cut on foreign exchange. It has built its whole tech stack from the ground up and says that this lets it pass on lower exchange rates to its customers, typically lower than others that might be serving the same markets. On top of this, there is an economy of scale principle at play here: having better rates will drive more users, which in turn might not mean better margins but a higher volume of transacting and more returns overall.

The startup is the third entrepreneurial outing for Michael Faye, a development economist who previously worked for the United Nations. Before Taptap Send, Fay founded GiveDirectly and Segovia. In each business, he’s tried to take the same approach: building financial technology to improve the lot of people living in emerging markets. GiveDirectly (still going strong) did this for philanthropic donations — it’s an NGO that sets up donation campaigns where individuals and big businesses can contribute, and people in receiving countries can directly get the funding via mobile money transfers. Segovia (acquired by Crown Agents Bank) did this for B2B use cases — it built a mobile-money-transfer-as-a-service, which other money transfer companies could use to power their businesses, by way of an API.

Taptap Send can be thought of as Faye’s hat trick in the space, taking the bigger concept of remittances used to help people, and building it as a C2C business: aimed at individuals who are sending people “back home” money to live on.

“Taptap Send is taking advantage of this structural change in mobile money and other distribution networks to offer what we hope is the fastest and best price service to customers,” he told TechCrunch in an interview.

Taken together, cross-border remittances is a massive market, worth some $540 billion annually when you consider the established channels, with more “informal” methods (which can be as analogue as passing money via a person making a trip from one country to the other) estimated to be of nearly the same size. They are also, in fact, more valuable even than foreign direct investment: the World Bank has tracked that remittances overtook the money donated by states in 2019.

Mobile technology has played a big part in that, making it easier both to send and receive money, but it’s also opened the door to a lot of potential exploitation by bad actors, preying on people who might use a service for convenience and not be fully clear on how the actual pricing breaks down.

For that reason, the UN has set a goal for remittance pricing and commissions to be no higher for any company than 3% of the total sent — one way to ensure that players focus more on volume and less on margins. Taptap send says that it’s the only company in the space that has publicly committed to that goal (it has yet to hit it, it seems).

The company is not yet disclosing many numbers on its size or customers served but Faye tells me business overall grew 5x in the last year, and is posting a gross profit. “Even with everything happening you did see this massive increase in digitization,” he said of Covid-19 and its impact on business. He’s also undeterred by the vast amounts of competition in the space, which includes not just companies like Western Union and Money Gram but lots and lots of smaller remittance startups like Remitly, World Remit, and many more without the word “remit” in their names. “It’s easy to look at remittance and say it’s crowded, but so was video conferencing before Zoom or social networking before Facebook,” he said.

This is also why investors are interested.

“The company has a nuanced, yet powerful strategy that Michael has put into place to allow [it] to be the lowest-cost provider in every market they enter. As the world rapidly shifts toward digital wallets and e-money, it creates an opportunity for remittance companies to create an even more magical experience by sending funds directly to those wallets,” noted Brendan Dickinson, a general partner at Canaan. “Taptap Send gives as much of cost savings as possible to the customer, and as a result, is almost always the cheapest player in the market. All of that makes it economically viable to send smaller remittances – and in doing so, expands the total market and volume of remittances sent. This approach is strongly resonating with customers, as Taptap Send’s massive growth has been 90+% organic.”

While the cryptocurrency market’s most recent hype wave seems to be dying down after a spectacular rise, Andreessen Horowitz’s crypto arm is reaffirming its commitment to startups building blockchain projects with a hulking new $2.2 billion crypto fund.

It’s the firm’s largest vertical-specific fund ever — by quite a bit.

Andreessen Horowitz’s 2018 crypto fund ushered in $300 million of LP commitments and its second fund, which it closed in April of last year, clocked in at $515 million. The new multi-billion dollar fund not only showcases how institutional backers are growing more comfortable with cryptocurrencies, but also how Andreessen Horowitz’s assets under management have been quickly swelling to compete with other deep-pocketed firms including the ever-prolific Tiger Global.

With this announcement, Andreessen now has some $18.8 billion assets under management.

LPs are likely far less wary to take a chance on crypto after Andreessen Horowitz’s stake in Coinbase equated to some $11.2 billion at the time of the direct listing’s first trades, though the stock has slid back some 30% in recent months as the crypto market has shrunk.

Some of the firm’s other major crypto bets include NBA Top Shot maker Dapper Labs which hit a $7.5 billion valuation this spring. Blockchain infrastructure startup Dfinity raised at a $9.5 billion valuation this past September. Last year, the firm led the Series A of Uniswap, which is poised to be a major player in the Ethereum ecosystem. In addition to equity investments, a16z has also made major bets on the currencies themselves.

An earlier report from Newcomer last month reported a16z was targeting a $2 billion crypto fund and that they had already unloaded some of their crypto holdings before most cryptocurrencies took a major dive in recent weeks.

Crypto Fund III will continue to be managed by GPs Chris Dixon and Katie Haun, but the firm has also begun spinning out a more robust management team around the crypto vertical.

Anthony Albanese, who joined the firm last year from the NYSE, has been appointed COO of the division. Tomicah Tillemann, who previously served as a senior advisor to now-President Joe Biden and as chairman of the Global Blockchain Business Council, will be a16z Crypto’s Global Head of Policy. Rachael Horwitz is also coming aboard as an Operating Partner leading marketing and communications for a16z crypto; leaving Google after a stint as Coinbase’s first VP of Communications as well.

A couple other folks are also coming on in advisory capacity, including entrepreneur Alex Price and a couple others who will likely be a tad helpful in regulatory maneuverings including Bill Hinman, formerly of the SEC, and Brent McIntosh, who recently served as Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs.