Author: azeeadmin

Hey you there — early-stage founders. Yes, you. TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising, our mini masterclass in entrepreneurship, is right around the proverbial corner. And by mini we mean it’s just two days — July 8-9. There’s nothing mini about the expert advice, information and actionable tips you’ll glean from attending this event.

Buy your pass today and get ready to learn how to build a better startup without reinventing the wheel (good thing we don’t charge by the cliché).

Day one is packed with presentations by a passel of outstanding subject-matter experts. Don’t miss these sponsored breakout sessions — they cover essential topics such as value-added investing, crafting customer experience, building high-performance teams and how to stand out while fundraising.

Check the agenda for exact times in your specific time zone.

More than Capital – Value Add Investing: There is a wide variety of capital outlets available for entrepreneurs to consider. Today more than ever, founders are seeking out investors that can deliver value add services to support startups throughout their growth journey. Dell Technologies Capital’s Chris Hillock will discuss the firm’s Portfolio Development Practice, and how their team of company builders helps founding team’s establish and hone product market fit, develop scaling strategies, and provide unique access to the Go to Market capabilities of the Dell Technologies Organization. Presented by Dell for Entrepreneurs.

Iterating More Effectively with Feedback: A great product alone is not enough. To be successful, early-stage companies need to optimize all phases of the customer journey. This session will include tactics, best practices, and case studies on how to use customer feedback to understand customer needs, craft more compelling messaging, and improve all phases of the customer experience. Presented by Nate Wright, VP of product marketing at UserTesting.

Inspiring High-performance Teams — The Movile Way: Big dreams – unbelievably big ones – can really help people see the future. And they will rally your team to move faster, together. Learn the proven methodology taught at universities like Harvard and Stanford to create a highly effective, “can do” culture to catapult your startup to the next level. And continue to attract and retain talent, because sizable ambitions inspire teams based on Movile’s wildly successful “Mobile Dream” internship and recruitment program. Presented by Patrick Hruby, CEO, and Luciana Carvalho, VP, at Movile.

Standing Out During Your Fundraising Process: Fundraising is never easy, but the right preparation can make all the difference. Three-time founder Waseem Daher joins Katie Myrick, Pilot’s GM, to share the KPIs investors look for, which questions they ask, and what you need to succeed at the various stages of investment. Currently CEO of Pilot, which specializes in bookkeeping, tax and CFO services for high-growth startups, Waseem is a three-time entrepreneur with two successful exits. Presented by Pilot.

How to survive high-speed startup growth during COVID-19 and retooling for growth opportunities in post-pandemic: On a journey to build a virtual real estate world? Meet oVice — an early-stage startup that witnessed massive growth and became the top virtual space in Japan in less than one year. In this session, you will hear from CFO, Daniel Buckley and Shinji Asada, CEO of One Capital and lead investor of oVice, on how to effectively scale as you grow without imploding. Presented by oVice.

TC Early Stage 2021: Marketing and Fundraising takes place on July 8-9. Grab a pass today and take maximum advantage of this mini masterclass.

Is your company interested in sponsoring or exhibiting at Early Stage 2021 – Marketing & Fundraising? Contact our sponsorship sales team by filling out this form.

Mercedes-Benz has used the “best or nothing” tagline to market its vehicles for the last 21 years. To ensure its 2021 Mercedes-Benz S580 sedan ticks that “best” box, the German automaker has loaded its flagship vehicle with technology, including an infotainment system that learns to anticipate its owner’s needs, some new rear-steering tricks and upgrades to its advanced driver assistance features.

With a price tag that starts at a steep $110,850, it’s the luxury car for the exceedingly well-heeled executive who wants the top-of-the-line Mercedes sedan with all the bells and whistles modern driving and living requires — and then some.

In S-Class tradition, the sedan is still a big baller. The new version gets longer (by 1.3-inches) and taller (by 0.4-inches), making more space for passengers and cargo. The base 2021 Mercedes-Benz S500 comes with all-wheel drive and a new inline six-cylinder engine that makes 429 horsepower and 384 lb-ft of torque. That’s a 60-plus horsepower bump over the last generation model. The S580 that I drove also came with all-wheel drive and a smooth, powerful and quiet 4.0-liter twin-turbo V8 that makes 496 horsepower and 516 lb-ft of torque. Both versions also get a 48-volt onboard mild hybrid system.

Mercedes has always touted its “human-centered innovation” in its S-Class. Initially, the automaker used technology to improve safety (things like ensuring that the doors wouldn’t suddenly spring open in a crash in the 1950s and crumple zones in the1960s). Since the 1990s, the brand has focused on making driving, parking and navigation less clunky and difficult to use. For example, it had an optional voice recognition package in 1996 that allowed you to activate your carphone (remember those‽) with a voice command.

Mercedes has continued to push the technology envelope, most recently launching an all-electric counterpart to the S Class called the EQS. The 2021 S-Class might mark a new generation of the executive hauler, and it has plenty of technology to offer, but it doesn’t quite outshine the all-electric EQS.

Driver assistance

Image Credits: Mercedes-Benz

Mercedes has long been a player in the advanced driver assistance system space, debuting an adaptive cruise control feature called Distronic in 1998.

In the 2021 S-Class, ADAS gets an upgrade (called Drive Pilot) that includes a total of 22 sensors and cameras all around the vehicle, which send information to five multicore processors that can analyze the driving situation 1,000 times per second and adapt the suspension accordingly.

All that’s to say, the car “sees” and responds to road conditions, other vehicles, road signs, pedestrians and cyclists, and then should respond like a human driver would.

On the drive from Los Angeles to Montecito (about 130 miles if you take the freeway the whole way), on both winding mountain and ocean roads and stop-and-go traffic on LA’s heinous, concrete block 405 freeway, I kept the S580 in adaptive cruise for most of the trip. The system worked as intended, with the S-Class accelerating and stopping at the appropriate times as I crept along in bumper-to-bumper traffic, from the 105 to the 101. What’s more: I wasn’t exhausted (and pissed off) when I arrived at my destination after a meandering six hours on the road.

Even when a texting Angeleno decided to change lanes, nearly side-swiped my car and narrowly avoided driving into the backseat of the vehicle ahead, the adaptive cruise system maintained control. I was paying attention as this incident unfolded, but Mercedes has designed its system to ensure drivers are attentive even as the ADAS features handle some of the driving tasks.

Touch sensors inside the car and on the steering wheel as well as eye-tracking and facial recognition cameras monitor the attentiveness of the driver. Take your hands off the sensors, and the driver’s display will alert you to your wandering ways, disengaging the ADAS system after a few seconds.

The eye detection and facial monitoring is used to recognize typical signs of drowsiness and driver inattention, and displays a warning message prompting the driver to take a break. There’s also a new microsleep warning that tracks the driver’s eyelid movements by a camera in the driver display.

Image Credits: Mercedes-Benz

Mercedes claims that the 2021 S-Class is prepped for Level 4 autonomous driving and, in their September announcement of the new vehicle, executives said that “Level 3 conditional driving is near.” The hardware in the vehicle is meant to support that ultimate goal.

Those 22 sensors and cameras are now capable of recognizing speed limit signs, construction zones and other road hazards, which, at times, I found a little annoying. There were some stretches where the posted speed limit dropped to 55, and when ADAS was engaged, the S-Class would suddenly slow to match the posted speed. That’s great when traffic around you isn’t still moving at 70-plus miles per hour, but in quick-moving traffic, it’s unnerving.

The new S-Class is also outfitted with a lane-changing assistant that helps the driver safely make a lane change without disengaging the ADAS system. Flip on the blinker while operating cruise control (and keeping your eyes up and hands on the wheel), and the S-Class will safely maneuver the sedan from one lane to the other, provided all is clear, centering it in the lane, with very little input from the driver.

In addition to the ADAS advancements, Mercedes has upgraded its parking assistant, as well. When optioned with its branded Intelligent Park Pilot, the S-Class “could” conceivably park itself in multilevel automated valet parking (AVP) structures without a human in the vehicle. As Mercedes notes, though, that would only be available in properly equipped parking structures and “provided that national legislation permits such operation.”

The new S-Class has gotten so large (overall it’s as long as most midsized SUVs on the market today), Mercedes integrated new rear-axle steering, which can turn the rear wheels in both directions up to an angle of 10 degrees, which reduces the turning radius by nearly seven feet.

Mercedes has also paired this with an advanced air suspension system that acts both to soften the ride and adapt to float you over rough roads, while providing an additional layer of safety using those sensors and cameras around the car. If a side impact is impending, the system can lift the body of the car by about three inches in a few tenths of a second to protect passengers.

AI Assistant

Unlike the EQS that my counterpart, Tamara Warren, drove, there was no 56-inch Hyperscreen in the $148,000-plus S580 I drove. Instead, a single 12.8-inch OLED screen that stretches from dash to armrest graces the center stack and is the control hub of the vehicle. Here you can do everything from control the fragrance that emanates from a diffuser in the glovebox to access Mercedes wellness features. The screen is bright and clear in high-noon sun with no glare and surprisingly not distracting at night.

Image Credits: Mercedes-Benz

However, one of the most impressive features in the new S-Class is the crystal clear and tremendously impressive 3D, augmented reality, head-up display projected onto the windshield. You can move your head around and still see the display from any angle in the driver’s seat. It’s even somewhat visible from the passenger seat. Use the infotainment system (known as MBUX, short for Mercedes Benz User Experience) to navigate to a destination of choice and as you approach offramps, turns and your final location, blue augmented-reality arrows pop up in the HUD and over a video feed of the road ahead in the center stack indicating which lane you should be in, where your turn is and showing exactly where the address you’re looking for is. You can also turn the feature off and change the driver’s instrument display if it gets too distracting, using the touch-capacitive buttons on the steering wheel.

Mercedes says that the computing power of MBUX has increased by 50% compared to the system in the previous model, and the memory bandwidth is 41,790 MB/s powered by NVIDIA Xavier (versus the Tegra 3 in the last generation). That translates to almost no stuttering, load lag or confusion on the system’s part.

Plus, it also helps the very good, natural language voice recognition system work almost perfectly. You can use touch-capacitive buttons on the steering wheel to activate the voice assistant or simply say the key phrase, “Hey, Mercedes,” to activate voice commands. Do everything from ask the system to look something up for you (provided you have connectivity), change the temperature, run one of Mercedes preprogrammed wellness programs (changes lighting, temperature and massage settings), call your parents, or navigate to a new location and the system almost never misses a beat. The only trouble I had with it was when trying to use voice control to navigate to an address with more than four numbers in it. (e.g., 12345 West Elm Street). After a few tries, I resorted to plugging it in on the very intuitive, easy-to-use touchscreen on the center stack.

While I didn’t spend enough time with the new S-Class to try some of the more advanced AI features it offers, Mercedes says that MBUX can do everything from integrate your connected home into the system to navigate to your favorite spots, just like the one in the EQS. In theory, you can then ask the system to turn on your home lights, and it will learn when you like to start the espresso machine on your drive home., As you drive regular routes and ask the system to perform tasks like make calls, or navigate to a specific place each day, the AI will learn your habits. Eventually, it will simply ask you if you’d like to call your office at a specific time or set a route to your favorite restaurant.

Packed to the gills with tons of features, technology and amenities that make driving a lot more comfortable and a lot less stressful, it’s no wonder that the S-Class has already garnered several accolades, including World Luxury Car of the Year (Disclosure: I am a World Car Juror). If luxury is all about seamless and invisible technology that makes long drives feel more like a spa day, then the 2021 Mercedes-Benz S Class has it in spades.

Entrepreneurs’ mental health and stress management started to be more widely discussed amid the pandemic, but for many seasoned entrepreneurs, the topic is still taboo. Now that the world seems to be inching toward a new normal, some founders, investors and mental health experts find themselves asking whether we need to consider mental health moving forward if it wasn’t an issue before the pandemic.

We do. For one, it absolutely was an issue before the pandemic. Furthermore, what drives the mental health epidemic among entrepreneurs is their propensity to accept risk.

“Entrepreneurs bring in a lot of vulnerability into their jobs, and when combined with the risks they are required to take, the vulnerability can be exacerbated when those risks don’t work out,” said Michael Freeman, a clinical professor of psychiatry at the University of California San Francisco School of Medicine and founder of Econa. “And in most cases, it doesn’t work out, and so they are more vulnerable to feeling mental health symptoms and entering a downward spiral. The reverse is also true. When entrepreneurs are knocking it out of the park, they are vulnerable to a different set of mental health challenges.”

So how do we address these issues and train entrepreneurs to sharpen and maintain their mental acuity, particularly when things get tough while fundraising?

It’s simple: prevention and awareness. In terms of prevention, Freeman said it comes down to destigmatizing entrepreneur mental health differences, celebrating entrepreneur mental health superpowers and adopting a downside-prevention lifestyle.

“With mental health, as is true with many things medical, an ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure,” Freeman said. “For entrepreneurs who want to prevent mental health issues, they need to start by taking a lifestyle risk factor assessment.”

According to Freeman, there are five ways entrepreneurs can support their mental health. (If you or someone you know is feeling hopeless and depressed, please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255.)

1. Sleep. The most significant role of sleep is to help your brain power up and stay awake during the day. Allowing your mind and your body to recover can have a profound preventative effect. You can’t pitch if you can’t keep your eyes open.
2. Exercise, and make sure you sweat. Entrepreneurs should get at least 45 minutes of exercise a day, including an intensity that makes you sweat twice a week. It not only has health benefits: It enhances executive functioning, meaning it improves your ability to focus and get things done. It also helps you regulate your emotions when you’re listening to a VC completely shred your idea so you don’t become despondent after a call. When you’re fundraising, your ability to think clearly can be the difference between getting a yes and a no.
3. Get and keep friends that have nothing to do with business. Entrepreneurship is a lonely profession at times. Aside from work, you want to have a small but engaged circle of friends and loved ones, and be careful not to let your relationships devolve into the blur of work. Keep those relationships and allow them to support you when work gets rough.
4. Eat well, and eat strategically. Many entrepreneurs live at or below the poverty line at some point in their journey, and when you’re under pressure with limited resources, eating junk and fast food is the wrong tradeoff to make because they aren’t good for cognitive functioning, among many other health consequences.
5. Address mental health concerns in weeks, not months. When entrepreneurs don’t manage concerns quickly, they can turn into adverse outcomes. “If mental health symptoms are prolonged … it can lead to more severe mental health consequences,” Freeman said. “The adverse personal outcomes include anything from experiencing more serious mental health issues to disrupting social relationships and performance falloffs at work. The adverse business outcomes that may result include bankruptcy, losing employees, alienating strategic alliance partners and scaring away potential investors.”

Awareness begins by gaining an understanding of the factors that could exacerbate your stress levels and impact your ability to complete a successful raise, and then planning accordingly. Things that could raise your stress levels include everything from your pre-raise financial status and health history to gender, race, industry attitudes, institutional barriers and even citizenship.

“Entrepreneurs of color, immigrants and women are far more conscious of the glass ceiling,” Freeman said. “It can be a factor in your mental health while you’re raising. … People from groups that have been otherized in one way or another have different obstacles that are difficult to overcome overall, as well as from a mental health perspective.”

Kerry Schrader, the co-founder of SaaS platform Mixtroz, knows all too well how these things can impact you while fundraising. Although she and her daughter Ashlee Ammons did eventually raise more than a million dollars, the pressure of potentially being the next Black women to do so was overwhelming.

“We stopped holding onto the pressure of being the 37th and 38th Black women to raise over $1 million,” she said. “We got caught up thinking, if we’re not successful, then we will be the reason other Black women are not funded. Honestly, we decided to remove that additional layer of stress from our thinking and just focused on running a profitable business that people could get behind and hoping for the same grace the majority of our white male counterparts get upon failure: Another chance and more funding, which we knew was and still is not the norm.”

According to Schrader, there was little information available about how to manage their mental health while fundraising, leading her and her daughter to try a variety of methods before finding something that made sense.

Based on her experience, here are five more ways entrepreneurs can manage their mental health while fundraising.

1. Find a counselor or therapist to help navigate your increased stress level. There’s a slow shift that has helped entrepreneurs reframe therapy from something that you do as a reaction to being overwhelmed to a preventative method that helps you thrive. “I leveraged BetterHelp to talk with someone while I raised,” Schrader said. “By communicating to a third party, I could say anything. Venting privately allowed me to reframe my conversations with investors more effectively. By having a qualified professional to speak to, I was able to shift my mindset from, ‘You’re doing me a big favor’ to ‘I have an exciting opportunity and I’m allowing you to invest early.’ Counseling helped a lot.”
2. Give yourself an out. Goal-setting is a great way to keep things on track, but it can create an illusion that you’re not going to be successful if you’re not constantly moving toward a finite endpoint. “Initially, we started putting criteria for what actions we would take if we did not hit certain milestones,” Schrader said. “Instead of feeling like we could put ourselves in a position of failure, we had rules for when it would be time to end the business and go back to our careers. Having an agreed-upon ‘out’ with my co-founder … was great for my mental health. And here we are, years later, still in the game and mostly sane.”
3. Leverage your team. You can’t go it alone. Be willing to rely on your team to move your startup forward and preserve your health. “Shortly after we closed our friends and family round, I was diagnosed with breast cancer,” Schrader said. “I was going to radiation, surgery and treatments while I was raising. I was pitching from the hospital bed. But when you’re fundraising, it never stops. That’s when my daughter decided it was time to commit full time. As a family, we realized we needed to lean on each other if we were going to be successful long term.”
4. Remain flexible with your plans. When you’re just starting, you focus too much on set plans. But when you dig into the backstories of prominent entrepreneurs, you’ll find that they pivoted as needed and learned on the go. “There were times during our raise when we had to be able to cope with weekly, daily and even hourly changes to our plan,” Schrader said. “I describe it as buying a plane, learning to fly the plane and then looking for a hangar to refuel all at the same time. You can try to organize all you want, but I don’t know how much planning you can do.”
5. Be intentional about the type of stress you’re willing to deal with for money. When you’re fundraising, the obvious goal is to secure a check. But some entrepreneurs agree to untenable terms in order to receive capital. It’s important to know your limits before you walk into the room. “When someone thinks they have the upper hand they will try to see how much stuff they can push you for. Don’t forget your why. … When you know what you can take without losing yourself, stand your ground,” Schrader said. “And remember, even as an entrepreneur, declining is always an option, specifically if the decision to decline protects your sanity.”

If you or someone you know is feeling hopeless and depressed, please call the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-273-8255.

Meet Airbank, a startup that is taking advantage of open banking regulation and related APIs to aggregate all your bank accounts. Focused on startups and small and medium companies, the company wants to build an all-in-one banking interface to access financial data, initiate payments, manage cash flow and more.

Airbank just raised a $3 million (€2.5 million) seed round led by Pia d'Iribarne and Jean de la Rochebrochard at New Wave, with Speedinvest and Tiny VC also participating. A handful of business angels are also joining the round, such as Cris Conde (Executive in Residence at Accel), Luca Ascani (Accel scout) and Marc McCabe (Sequoia scout).

The startup’s value proposition is quite simple and can be easily explained in one screenshot. With Airbank, you can enter your login information for all the bank accounts and related accounts that you use. After that, you can view everything from your Airbank account:

Image Credits: Airbank

Many companies have to deal with multiple bank accounts for several reasons — you may have opened one bank account when you incorporated your company, another bank account to request a loan, a Wise Business account for low foreign transaction fees, a Revolut Business account to get debit cards for everyone, etc.

In addition to bank accounts, chances are you’re also generating revenue with Stripe, PayPal or Shopify. Many executives lose a ton of time connecting to web portals, exporting data as CSV files, importing those files in Microsoft Excel and consolidating all that information.

Airbank automatically refreshes your balances across several accounts. You can see your total balance in multiple currencies. It can also help you reconcile transactions with outstanding invoices as you can search across multiple accounts at once.

This is just a starting point as Airbank wants to become the only interface for all your banking needs. You can categorize transactions, see how much you’re spending with each supplier, track recurring payments and export everything to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel. Soon, you’ll be able to use Airbank for cash flow forecasting and automatic reconciliation with your Xero or Quickbooks data.

Open banking isn’t limited to account aggregation. With proper APIs, you should be able to initiate payments from a third-party product. And Airbank plans to take advantage of that as the company is working on payments. As you can manage access rights, Airbank could act as the payment portal for the finance team.

“Open banking has enabled smooth integrations with banks, which we can utilize to offer richer banking and payments experiences for our users. Our vision is to build an all-in-one finance hub that connects all your financial accounts in one place. Our integrations will bring bill payments, expense management, and FX all in a single product that is easy to use,” co-founder and CEO Christopher Zemina said in a statement.

Other startups have been working on cash flow management, such as Agicap, and B2B payments, such as Libeo and Upflow. Airbank is starting with account aggregation and wants to tackle B2B finance in a holistic manner.

Vertical SaaS products have been booming lately. And there’s a reason why the space is quite competitive. There’s still a ton of stuff to do around B2B fintech and specialized software-as-a-service products.

Quanergy Systems, the Sunnyvale, California-based lidar company, said Tuesday it has agreed to merge with special purpose acquisition fund CITIC Capital Acquisition Corp., a Chinese blank-check firm affiliated with the country’s largest state-owned investment conglomerate.

The deal, which puts an implied valuation on Quanergy at $1.4 billion, is expected to close in the second half of 2021. After closing, the transaction will inject the lidar company with around $278 million in pro forma net cash, including $40 million in private investment in public equity (PIPE) funding.

Lidar is an essential component of most autonomous driving systems – the notable exception being Tesla’s stack, which is attempting to develop a pure vision-based system to support its pursuit of automated driving (Tesla vehicles are not autonomous today and have what is considered a Level 2 advanced driver assistance system). Quanergy is a developer of solid state silicon lidar units, which pulses a low-power laser through an optical phased array to measure the distance and shape of objects. Historically, lidar sensors involved moving parts – generally some mechanism to rotate the laser so it can scan the surrounding area. The company also develops perception software that interprets the sensor data.

Quanergy has had a bumpy road to the NYSE. The company generated a lot of hype after it announced in 2016 that it had developed a lidar that cost $250 or less (for reference, around the same time Velodyne was selling a lidar sensor for $75,000). The news shot the company to unicorn status and incited talks of a potential initial public offering, Bloomberg reported. But excitement was tempered after Quanergy hit technical roadblocks.

Then the company announced in January 2020 that CEO and co-founder Louay Eldada would be leaving the company. Kevin Kennedy took over as interim CEO, then became the permanent leader in April. Quanergy says it has more than 350 customers and 40 partnerships globally, across both the automotive and internet of things sectors. Its investors include automakers Daimler and Geely, as well as Samsung and Enterprise.

Quanergy says the proceeds from the SPAC transaction will be used to accelerate research and development, pay down debt and fund working capital. Upon closing, Quanergy will be listed on the NYSE under the ticker symbol “QNGY.”

The SPAC, CITIC Capital Acquisition Corp., is sponsored by CITIC Capital Holdings Limited, an investment firm backed by Chinese conglomerate CITIC Group. Quanergy must file for clearance with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS). The company anticipates CFIUS greenlighting the deal because CITIC would keep its stake in the company below 10%, and Quanergy does not record any personal driver data, Reuters reported.

Quanergy is not the first lidar company to go public via a SPAC merger. Others include AEye, which will merge with CF Finance Acquisition Corp. III at a $2 billion deal, and Volvo-partnered Luminar at a $3.4 billion valuation.

India’s antitrust watchdog has ordered an investigation into allegations that Google has abused the dominant position of Android in the country’s smart TV market. The news comes hours after the European Union opened a formal antitrust investigation into allegations that Google abuses its leading role in the advertising-technology sector.

In its initial review, the Competition Commission of India, which began looking into these allegations last year, said Google had breached certain anti-competitive laws.

“Google makes AOSP available to any third parties under an open- source license, however, the AOSP license does not grant OEMs, the right to distribute Google’s proprietary apps such as Play Store, YouTube, etc. referred to as Google Applications in TADA. The AOSP license further does not grant OEMs, the right to use the Android logo and other Android related trademarks,” it said in a 24-page order.

“In order to be able to preinstall Google’s proprietary apps, device manufacturers have to commit to comply with the ACC (Android Compatibility Commitments) for all devices based on Android manufactured/distributed/sold by them; and in order to be able to preinstall any proprietary app of Google, e.g. Play Store, device manufacturers will have to preinstall the entire suite of Google apps,” the order adds.

Google has denied any wrongdoing. “We are confident that our smart TV licensing practices are in compliance with all applicable competition laws,” a company spokesperson said in a statement.

About 8 million smart TV sets were sold in India in 2019, over 60% of which were powered by Google’s Android operating system.

It’s a tough week for American giants in India. On Monday evening, the world’s second largest internet market proposed tough e-commerce rules that could hurt Amazon and Walmart’s Flipkart.

Tuesday’s order is the third ongoing antitrust case investigation that India has opened against Google. Late last year, India’s antitrust watchdog opened an investigation into Google for allegedly abusing the dominant position of its app store to promote its payments service in the South Asian nation.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

The future of work is long on long-distance, and today a startup that’s built a platform to help organizations hire global talent and build out those remote workforces is announcing a round of funding on the heels of strong growth.

Oyster — which provides tools to help with hiring, onboarding, payroll, benefits and salary management services for both contractors and full-time employees working outside of an organization’s home country — has closed a Series B of $50 million.

We understand that the funding is coming in at a $475 million valuation, six times the company’s valuation when it last raised money — a $20 million round just four months ago. The company itself has seen business grow “exponentially” since then, said Tony Jamous, London-based Oyster’s CEO who co-founded the company with Jack Mardack. The company now works with 80 large businesses, he said, helping them fill knowledge worker roles.

Stripes is leading the Series B, with previous backers Emergence Capital and The Slack Fund, as well as new investor Avid Ventures, also participating.

Jamous told me back in February that the idea for building Oyster was first planted when he was working at his first startup, Nexmo (which eventually he sold to Vonage), after being faced with the challenges of hiring talent internationally, and specifically the millions the company invested to build out the infrastructure to do so itself, since every country has very specific procedures for employing people and handling all of the contractural, tax, and regulatory details related to that.

Oyster’s mission has been to  make it possible for any company to hire wherever they want, without going through that pain themselves, making the “world their oyster,” so to speak.

While that in itself is a great idea that definitely fills a need for businesses, it has also been compounded by recent changing tides. Not only are more people wanting to work further afield, but at “home”, many companies — especially those who need to fill knowledge worker roles — are facing talent shortages. All of this is driving even more demand for sourcing and hiring candidates from further afield, and a culture in the workplace that it’s possible to work well even if you are not in the same physical space.

“What’s happening in the world is that there’s a talent shortage, and also there’s no need to be in the office anymore,” he said. “When it comes to tapping into the global talent pool, if you think about it, if you’re a London-based company, then the chances that your best talent is in London is less than 1%. So by tapping into the global talent pool, suddenly you’re dramatically increasing your chances, especially if you depend on talent as as a key source of your success.”

The number of startups in the market today targeting the remote working opportunity — helping companies source and hire people wherever they happen to be located — and Oyster is not the only one of them raising big money to scale. Others include Deel, which is now valued at $1.25 billion; Turing; Papaya Global (now also valued at over $1 billion); Remote, and many more.

Oyster is not — yet? — in the business of helping to source or vet potential hires, but once someone is identified and an organization wants to make an offer, Oyster provides a seamless way to handle the rest, including giving advice on whether it’s best to hire the person as a contractor or full time employee (the trend here, he said, is full-time), how to handle benefits based on the country in which the talent is based; and other aspects of remuneration, again particular to each local market. Pricing ranges from $29 per person, per month for contractors, to $399 for working with full employees, to other packages for larger deployments.

The company also has a public service mission in all this. Jamous himself originally hails from Lebanon and has a particular mission to help people from less high-profile parts of the world, and emerging countries, also get on the career ladder. In this day and age, since relocation and migration are no longer a must-do, it opens up a lot of opportunities for people that didn’t exist before. Oyster applied for, and now has B-Corp certification, which it’s using to fill out that global employment and talent mandate.

This is not just for greater good, though. There are actual talent shortages, and a recent study from Korn Ferry, cited by Oyster, found that 1.5 billion knowledge workers will be entering the workforce in the next decade from emerging economies. Building tools to help hire and manage that talent makes business sense.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Stripes for the next chapter of growth and positive impact for Oyster,” said Jack Mardack, co-Founder of Oyster, in a statement. “Investors like Stripes, Emergence, Slack Fund, Avid, and PeopleTech Partners among others, who share in our passion for the Oyster mission and vision for the future of work, give us the rocket fuel we need to change the world by unblocking access to job opportunities for everyone.”

“The transition to remote work is one of the most fundamental macro trends in business today and COVID-19 accelerated that transition by 10 years,” said Saagar Kulkarni, partner at Stripes, in a statement. “Oyster makes it seamless for any company to hire the best person for each job, removing location as a barrier. Tony and the team have built the best software product in the market and are poised to build a market-defining company. We are thrilled to join the entire Oyster team on their mission to level the playing field for the global workforce.”

Vantage, a service that helps businesses analyze and reduce their AWS costs, today announced that it has raised a $4 million seed round led by Andreessen Horowitz. A number of angel investors, including Brianne Kimmel, Julia Lipton, Stephanie Friedman, Calvin French Owen, Ben and Moisey Uretsky, Mitch Wainer and Justin Gage, also participated in this round

Vantage started out with a focus on making the AWS console a bit easier to use — and help businesses figure out what they are spending their cloud infrastructure budgets on in the process. But as Vantage co-founder and CEO Ben Schaechter told me, it was the cost transparency features that really caught on with users.

“We were advertising ourselves as being an alternative AWS console with a focus on developer experience and cost transparency,” he said.”What was interesting is — even in the early days of early access before the formal GA launch in January — I would say more than 95% of the feedback that we were getting from customers was entirely around the cost features that we had in Vantage.”

Image Credits: Vantage

Like any good startup, the Vantage team looked at this and decided to double down on these features and highlight them in its marketing, though it kept the existing AWS Console-related tools as well. The reason the other tools didn’t quite take off, Schaechter believes, is because more and more, AWS users have become accustomed to infrastructure-as-code to do their own automatic provisioning. And with that, they spend a lot less time in the AWS Console anyway.

“But one consistent thing — across the board — was that people were having a really, really hard time twelve times a year, where they would get a shock AWS bill and had to figure out what happened. What Vantage is doing today is providing a lot of value on the transparency front there,” he said.

Over the course of the last few months, the team added a number of new features to its cost transparency tools, including machine learning-driven predictions (both on the overall account level and service level) and the ability to share reports across teams.

Image Credits: Vantage

While Vantage expects to add support for other clouds in the future, likely starting with Azure and then GCP, that’s actually not what the team is focused on right now. Instead, Schaechter noted, the team plans to add support for bringing in data from third-party cloud services instead.

“The number one line item for companies tends to be AWS, GCP, Azure,” he said. “But then, after that, it’s Datadog Cloudflare Sumo Logic, things along those lines. Right now, there’s no way to see, P&L or an ROI from a cloud usage-based perspective. Vantage can be the tool where that’s showing you essentially, all of your cloud costs in one space.”

That is likely the vision the investors bought in as well and even though Vantage is now going up against enterprise tools like Apptio’s Cloudability and VMware’s CloudHealth, Schaechter doesn’t seem to be all that worried about the competition. He argues that these are tools that were born in a time when AWS had only a handful of services and only a few ways of interacting with those. He believes that Vantage, as a modern self-service platform, will have quite a few advantages over these older services.

“You can get up and running in a few clicks. You don’t have to talk to a sales team. We’re helping a large number of startups at this stage all the way up to the enterprise, whereas Cloudability and Cloud Health are, in my mind, kind of antiquated enterprise offerings. No startup is choosing to use those at this point, as far as I know,” he said.

The team, which until now mostly consisted of Schaechter and his co-founder and CTO Brooke McKim, bootstrapped to company up to this point. Now they plan to use the new capital to build out its team (and the company is actively hiring right now), both on the development and go-to-market side.

The company offers a free starter plan for businesses that track up to $2,500 in monthly AWS cost, with paid plans starting at $30 per month for those who need to track larger accounts.

Pro-privacy browser Brave, which has been testing its own brand search engine for several months — operating a waitlist where brave (ha!) early adopters could kick the tyres of an upstart alternative in Internet search — has now launched the tool, Brave Search, in global beta.

Users interested in checking out Brave’s non-tracking search engine, which is built on top of an independent index and touted as a privacy-safe alternative to surveillance tech products like Google search, will find it via Brave’s desktop and mobile browsers. It can also be reached from other browsers via search.brave.com — so doesn’t require switching to Brave’s browser to use.

Brave Search is being offered as one of multiple search options that users of the company’s eponymous browser can pick from (including Google’s search engine). But Brave says it will make it the default search in its browser later this year.

As we reported back in March, the company acquired technology and developers who had previously worked on Cliqz, a European anti-tracking search-browser combo which closed down in May 2020 — building on a technology they’d started to develop, called Tailcat, to form the basis of the Brave-branded search engine.

The (now beta) search engine has been tested by more than 100,000 “early access users” at this point, per Brave. It’s made this video ad to tout its “all in one” alternative to Google search + Chrome.

The company recently passed 32M monthly active users (up from 25M back in March) for its wider suite of products — which, as well as its flagship pro-privacy browser, includes a news reader (Brave News), and a Firewall+VPN service.

Brave also offers privacy-preserving Brave Ads for businesses wanting to reach its community of privacy-preferring users.

Growing public awareness of surveillance based business models has been building momentum for pro-privacy consumer tech for a number of years. And several players which started out with a strong focus on one particular pro-privacy product (such as a browser, search engine or email) have been expanding into a full suite of products — all under the same non-tracking umbrella.

As well as Brave, there’s the likes of DuckDuckGo — which offers non-tracking search but also a tracker blocker and an email inbox protector tool, among other products, and reckons it now has between 70M-100M users overall; and Proton, the maker of e2e-encrypted email service ProtonMail but also a cloud calendar and file storage as well as a VPN. The latter recently confirmed passing 50M users globally.

There is also Apple itself too, of course — a Big Tech giant that competes with Google and the adtech complex by promising users a privacy premium to drive sales of its hardware and services. (At the start of this year Apple said there are now over 1BN iOS users globally — and over 1.65BN Apple devices.)

Tl;dr: The market for privacy consumer tech is growing.

Still, even Apple doesn’t try to compete against Google search which perhaps underlines the scale of the challenge involved in trying to poach users from the search behemoth. (Albeit, Apple extracts massive payments from Google to preload the latter’s search engine onto iOS devices — which does conflict with (and complicate) its wider, pro-privacy, pro-user promises while also adding a nice revenue boost for Apple… ).

DuckDuckGo has, by contrast, been at the non-tracking search coalface for years — and turning a profit since 2014. Though clearly not in the same profit league as Apple. But, more recently, it’s also taken in rare tranches of external funding as its investors spy growing opportunity for private search.

Other signs of expanding public appetite to protect people’s information from commercial snoopers include the surge of usage for e2e encrypted alternatives to Facebook-owned WhatsApp — such as Signal — which saw a download spike earlier this year, after the advertising giant announced unilateral changes to WhatsApp’s terms of service.

Credible players that have amassed a community of engaged users around a core user privacy promise are well positioned to ride each new wave of privacy interest — and cross sell a suite of consumer products where they’ve been able to expand their utility. Hence Brave believing the time is right for it to dabble in search.

Commenting in a statement, Brendan Eich, CEO and co-founder of Brave, said: “Brave Search is the industry’s most private search engine, as well as the only independent search engine, giving users the control and confidence they seek in alternatives to big tech. Unlike older search engines that track and profile users, and newer search engines that are mostly a skin on older engines and don’t have their own indexes, Brave Search offers a new way to get relevant results with a community-powered index, while guaranteeing privacy. Brave Search fills a clear void in the market today as millions of people have lost trust in the surveillance economy and actively seek solutions to be in control of their data.”

Brave touts its eponymous search offering as having a number of differentiating features vs rivals (including smaller rivals) — such as its own index which it also says gives it independence from other search providers.

Why is having an independent index important? We put that question to Josep M. Pujol, chief of search at Brave, who told us: “There are plenty of incentives for censorship and biases, either by design, or what is even more difficult to combat, unintentional. The problem of search, and how people access the web, is that it is a mono-culture, and everybody knows that while it’s very efficient, it’s also very dangerous. A single disease can kill all the crops. The current landscape is not fail-tolerant, and this is something that even users are becoming aware of. We need more choices, not to replace Google or Bing, but to offer alternatives. More choices will entail more freedom and also get back to real competition, with checks and balances.

“Choice can only be achieved by being independent, as if we do not have our own index, then we are just a layer of paint on top of Google and Bing, unable to change much or anything in the results for users’ queries. Not having your own index, as with certain search engines, gives the impression of choice, but in reality such engine ‘skins’ are the same players as the big-two. Only by building our own index, which is a costly proposition, will we be in a position to offer true choice to the users for the benefit of all, whether they are Brave Search users or not.”

Although, for now, it’s worth noting that Brave is relying on some provision from other search providers — for specific queries and in areas like image search (where, for example, it says it’s currently fetching results from Microsoft-owned Bing) — to ensure its results achieve adequate relevancy.

Elsewhere it also says it’s relying upon anonymized contributions from the community to improve and refine results — and is seeking to live up to wider transparency claims vis-a-vis the search index (which it also claims has “no secret methods or algorithms to bias results”; and for which it will “soon” be offering “community-curated open ranking models to ensure diversity and prevent algorithmic biases and outright censorship”).

In another transparency step Brave is reporting the percentage of users’ queries that are independent by showing what it bills as “the industry’s first search independence metric” — meaning it displays the ratio of results coming exclusively from its own index.

“It is derived privately using the user’s browser as we do not build user profiles,” Brave notes in a press release. “Users can check this aggregate metric to verify the independence of their results and see how results are powered by our own index, or if third-parties are being used for long tail results while we are still in the process of building our index.”

It adds that Brave Search will “typically be answering most queries, reflected by a high independence metric”. Although if you’re performing an image search, for example, you’ll see the the independence metric take a hit (but Brave confirms this will not result in any tracking of users).

“[Transparency] is a key principle at Brave, and there will also be a global independence metric for Brave Search across all searches, which we will make publicly available to show how we are progressing towards complete independence,” it adds.

Example of Brave’s ‘independence metric’ for search results (Image credits: Brave)

On the monetization side, Brave says it will “soon” be offering both a paid ad-free version of search in the future and an ad-supported free version — while still pledging “fully anonymous” search. Though it specifies that it won’t be flipping the ad switch during the early beta phase.

“We will offer options for both ad-free paid search and ad-supported free search later,” it notes. “When we are ready, we will explore bringing private ads with BAT revenue share to search, as we’ve done for Brave user ads.”

Users of the search engine who do not also use Brave’s own browser will be served contextual ads.

“In Brave Search via the browser, strong privacy guarantees for opt-in ads are a norm and a brand value that we uphold,” adds Pujol, confirming that users of its search and browser are likely to get the same type of ad targeting.

Asked about pricing of the forthcoming ad-free version of the search engine he says: “Although we have not finalized the launch date or the price yet, our ad-free paid search will be affordable because we believe search, and access to information, should be available on fair terms for everyone.”

In an interesting recent development in Europe, Google — under pressure from antitrust regulators — has agreed to ditch a pay-to-play auction model for the choice screen it offers regional users of its Android platform, letting them pick a default search engine from list with a number of rivals and its own brand Google search. The move should expand the number of alternative search engines Android users in Europe are exposed to — and could help chip away at some of Google’s search marketshare.

Brave previously told us it would not participate in Google’s paid auction — but Pujol says that if the new model is “truly free to participate” it will likely take part in future.

“Google and free-to-participate seem difficult to believe, given plenty of precedents but if this model is indeed truly free to participate, without contracts or non-disclosure agreements, then we would likely participate,” he says. “After all, Brave Search is open to everyone who would like to use it, and we are open and happy to put Brave Search on any platform.”

“We have localized browsers throughout the European market, so in addition to growth via the Brave browser growing, we intend to grow Brave Search’s usage by marketing our best-in-class privacy on all media that reach prospective users,” he adds.

When SoftBank announced its first Vision Fund back in 2017, TechCrunch gawked at the size of the fundraising vehicle and its $100 million minimum check size. Noting a few of its early deals, we wrote that “the party is just getting started.”

Little did we know how accurate that quip would become. The Vision Fund poured capital into a host of companies with big plans, or what could at least be construed as grandiose hypotheses about the future. And after deploying $98.6 billion in a blizzard of deals, SoftBank left the venture capital market changed.

It’s not a stretch to say that the Vision Fund helped make the venture capital game faster in terms of deal pacing and larger in terms of deal scale. The Vision Fund was also content to write checks at amped valuations, leading some investors to privately carp about lost deals.

Today’s venture capital market is currently enduring another wave of venture capital angst, this time driven by Tiger Global. Tiger often writes smaller checks than what SoftBank’s capital cannon wielded, but its pace and willingness to invest a lot, very early, at prices that other investors balk at, is making waves.

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And while Tiger races to build what increasingly appears to be a private index fund of software startups that have reached some sort of scale or growth, the venture capital market is seeing its traditional benchmarks tied to different tiers of investment molt, meld, or disappear altogether.

Old metrics that would ready a startup for a successful Series A are antiquated clichés. As are round sizes for Series A startups; it’s increasingly common for seed-stage startups to reload their accounts several times before approaching an A, and Series B rounds often resemble the growth-stage deals of yesteryear.

It’s confusing, and not Tiger’s fault, per se; the Tiger rush is a variation on the Vision Fund’s own venture disruption. And the Vision Fund followed in the footsteps of a16z, which raised large, rapid funds early in its life and garnered a reputation at the time for having a willingness to pay more than other venture capital firms for the same deal.

Where does all the change leave us? In a fascinating, if turbulent, market for startup fundraising.

For example, The Exchange caught up with Rudina Seseri of Glasswing Ventures the other week to chat about AI startups. During our conversation concerning venture capital dynamics, Seseri said something incredibly interesting: With as much seed capital as there is in the market today, she’s seeing startups raise later Series As than before. But, she added, with the creep of late-stage capital into the earlier stages of venture investing, Series B rounds can happen rapidly after a company raises an A.

So, slow As and fast Bs. We wanted to dig more into the concept, so we asked a number of other investors about her view. We’re tackling the question in two parts, focusing on the U.S. market today and the rest of the world later this week.

What we found out is that while Seseri’s view regarding late As and early Bs is correct for many startups, it really depends on whether they are on the radar of later-stage firms. And yes, some of the investors mentioned Tiger in their responses. Let’s dive in to understand what founders are really dealing with.