Author: azeeadmin

If you’ve ever bought a subscription inside an iOS app and later decided you wanted to cancel, upgrade or downgrade, or ask for a refund, you may have had trouble figuring out how to go about making that request or change. Some people today still believe that they can stop their subscription charges simply by deleting an app from their iPhone. Others may dig around unsuccessfully inside their iPhone’s Settings or on the App Store to try to find out how to ask for a refund. With the updates Apple announced in StoreKit 2 during its Worldwide Developers Conference this week, things may start to get a little easier for app customers.

StoreKit is Apple’s developer framework for managing in-app purchases — an area that’s become more complex in recent years, as apps have transitioned from offering one-time purchases to ongoing subscriptions with different tiers, lengths, and feature sets.

Currently, users who want to manage or cancel subscriptions can do so from the App Store or their iPhone Settings. But some don’t realize the path to this section from Settings starts by tapping on your Apple ID (your name and profile photo at the top of the screen). They may also get frustrated if they’re not familiar with how to navigate their Settings or the App Store.

Meanwhile, there are a variety of ways users can request refunds on their in-app subscriptions. They can dig in their inbox for their receipt from Apple, then click the “Report a Problem” link it includes to request a refund when something went wrong. This could be useful in scenarios where you’ve bought a subscription by mistake (or your kid has!), or where the promised features didn’t work as intended.

Apple also provides a dedicated website where users can directly request refunds for apps or content. (When you Google for something like “request a refund apple” or similar queries, a page that explains the process typically comes up at the top of the search results.)

Still, many users aren’t technically savvy. For them, the easiest way to manage subscriptions or ask for refunds would be to do so from within the app itself. For this reason, many conscientious app developers tend to include links to point customers to Apple’s pages for subscription management or refunds inside their apps.

But StoreKit 2 is introducing new tools that will allow developers to implement these sort of features more easily.

One new tool is a Manage subscriptions API, which lets an app developer display the manage subscriptions page for their customer directly inside their app — without redirecting the customer to the App Store. Optionally, developers can choose to display a “Save Offer” screen to present the customer with a discount of some kind to keep them from cancelling, or it could display an exit survey so you can ask the customer why they decided to end their subscription.

When implemented, the customer will be able to view a screen inside the app that looks just like the one they’d visit in the App Store to cancel or change a subscription. After cancelling, they’ll be shown a confirmation screen with the cancellation details and the service expiration date.

If the customer wants to request a refund, a new Refund request API will allow the customer to begin their refund request directly in the app itself — again, without being redirected to the App Store or other website. On the screen that displays, the customer can select which item they want refund and check the reason why they’re making the request. Apple handles the refund process and will send either an approval or refund declined notification back to the developer’s server.

However, some developers argue that the changes don’t go far enough. They want to be in charge of managing customer subscriptions and handling refunds themselves, through programmatic means. Plus, Apple can take up to 48 hours for the customer to receive an update on their refund request, which can be confusing.

“They’ve made the process a bit smoother, but developers still can’t initiate refunds or cancellations themselves,” notes RevenueCat CEO Jacob Eiting, whose company provides tools to app developers to manage their in-app purchases. “It’s a step in the right direction, but could actually lead to more confusion between developers and consumers about who is responsible for issuing refunds.”

In other words, because the forms are now going to be more accessible from inside the app, the customer may believe the developer is handling the refund process when, really, Apple continues to do so.

Some developers pointed out that there are other scenarios this process doesn’t address. For example, if the customer has already uninstalled the app or no longer has the device in question, they’ll still need to be directed to other means of asking for refunds, just as before.

For consumers, though, subscription management tools like this mean more developers may begin to put buttons to manage subscriptions and ask for refunds directly inside their app, which is a better experience. In time, as customers learn they can more easily use the app and manage subscriptions, app developers may see better customer retention, higher engagement, and better App Store reviews, notes Apple.

The StoreKit 2 changes weren’t limited to APIs for managing subscriptions and refunds.

Developers will also gain access to a new Invoice Lookup API that allows them to look up the in-app purchases for the customer, validate their invoice and identify any problems with the purchase — for example, if there were any refunds already provided by the App Store.

A new Refunded Purchases API will allow developers to look up all the refunds for the customer.

And a new Renewal Extension API will allow developers to extend the renewal data for paid, active subscriptions in the case of an outage — like when dealing with customer support issues when a streaming service went down, for example. This API lets developers extend the subscription up to twice per calendar year, each up to 90 days in the future.

Another change will help customers when they reinstall apps or download them on new devices. Before, users would have to manually “restore purchases” to sync the status of the completed transactions back to that newly downloaded or reinstalled app. Now, that information will be automatically fetched by StoreKit 2 so the apps are immediately up-to-date with whatever it is the user paid for.

While, overall, the changes make for a significant update to the StoreKit framework, Apple’s hesitancy to allow developers more control over their own subscription-based customers speaks, in part, to how much it wants to control in-app purchases. This is perhaps because it got burned in the past when it tried allowing developers to manage their own refunds.

As The Verge noted last month while the Epic Games-Apple antitrust trial was underway, Apple had once provided Hulu will access to a subscription API, then discovered Hulu had been offering a way to automatically cancel subscriptions made through the App Store when customers wanted to upgrade to higher-priced subscription plans. Apple realized it needed to take action to protect against this misuse of the API, and Hulu later lost access. It has not since made that API more broadly available.

On the flip side, having Apple, not the developers, in charge of subscription management and refunds means Apple takes on the responsibilities around preventing fraud — including fraud perpetrated by both customers and developers alike. Customers may also prefer that there’s one single place to go for managing their subscription billing: Apple. They may not want to have to deal with each developer individually, as their experience would end up being inconsistent.

These changes matter because subscription revenue contributes to a sizable amount of Apple’s lucrative App Store business. Ahead of WWDC 21, Apple reported the sale of digital goods and services on the App Store grew to $86 billion in 2020, up 40% over the the year prior. Earlier this year, Apple said it paid out more than $200 billion to developers since the App Store launched in 2008.

As I’m typing this, I’ve just finished my second panel for our big TC Sessions: Mobility event. The write-ups will be ready in time for next week’s roundup, but a couple of things worth thinking about in the meantime.

The first is partnerships with big companies like Walmart. I get the sense that Walmart really loves to play the field when it comes to partnering with small tech startups. And honestly, why not, right?

There’s a lot of upside and relatively little downside. At the end of the day, a company like Walmart is looking for a competitive advantage against Amazon, the galactic emperor of competitive advantages. Amazon, of course, has invested a ton in robotics, including acquisitions and first-party development.

For startups, there’s tremendous up and downside here. It’s hard not to see a company like Bossa Nova as a kind of cautionary tale on that front. The promising inventory scanning startup took a massive hit when Walmart backed out of a deal the company had invested large resources into. It left Bossa Nova shaken, to say the least.

There’s no easy math on this one. When a company like Walmart knocks on your door with a big contract, you want to jump in with both feet. But how do you avoid putting all of your eggs in that one basket. When it comes to emerging tech, companies like Walmart like to play the field.

Another subject I’ve been thinking a lot about of late is whether universities are doing enough to foster innovation in their own backyard. There are plenty of good and bad examples of this, but as someone who writes about robots, I keep coming back to Carnegie Mellon. Other big robotics schools like MIT and Stanford haven’t had to concern themselves with talent drain, in large part due to location.

So, how does a school like CMU both help budding entrepreneurs transition from laboratory to startup and keep that talent in its own backyard? The good news is I’ll be able to take that question directly to the source. I’ll be interviewing CMU President Farnam Jahanian at TC’s upcoming virtual Pittsburgh event on June 29. Here’s a quote from Jahanian to whet your appetite:

Carnegie Mellon’s decades-long leadership in research and education in AI and robotics has catalyzed an innovation ecosystem in the Pittsburgh region where entrepreneurship, creativity and placemaking intersect. These emerging technologies are changing the way we farm, enabling millions to learn a new language, leading the race to develop self-driving vehicles, and even going to the moon. We are committed to empowering citizens across Pittsburgh to take part in the economic benefits of these innovations as they continue to transform our world.

As we head into summer, the investments in the category aren’t coming quite as fast and furiously as they were earlier in the year. But I have it on good authority that we’ll be seeing some more robotics funding announcements in the not too distant future. Of course, for all of the reasons I’ve alluded to before, the warehouse space continues to be hot. And this week a Croatian firm named Gideon Brothers announced a $31 million raise. From a recent piece by Mike, here’s CEO Matija Kopić:

The pandemic has greatly accelerated the adoption of smart automation, and we are ready to meet the unprecedented market demand. The best way to do it is by marrying our proprietary solutions with the largest, most demanding customers out there. Our strategic partners have real challenges that our robots are already solving, and, with us, they’re seizing the incredible opportunity right now to effect robotic-powered change to some of the world’s most innovative organizations.

Kopić and team should clearly all consider changing their last name to Gideon and doing a whole Ramones thing. Of course, they’re the ones who just raised $31 million, so maybe they’re doing something right.

A mobile security startup has found seven security flaws in Samsung’s pre-installed mobile apps, which it says if abused could have allowed attackers broad access to a victim’s personal data.

Oversecured said the vulnerabilities were found in several apps and components bundled with Samsung phones and tablets. Oversecured founder Sergey Toshin told TechCrunch that the vulnerabilities were verified on a Samsung Galaxy S10+ but that all Samsung devices could be potentially affected because the baked-in apps are responsible for system functionality.

Toshin said the vulnerabilities could have allowed a malicious app on the same device to steal a victim’s photos, videos, contacts, call records and messages, and change settings “without any user consent or notice” by hijacking the permissions from Samsung’s stock apps.

One of the flaws could have allowed the theft of data by exploiting a vulnerability in Samsung’s Secure Folder app, which has a “large set” of rights across the device. In a proof-of-concept, Toshin showed the bug could be used to steal contacts data. Another bug in Samsung’s Knox security software could have been abused to install other malicious apps, while a bug in Samsung Dex could have been used to scrape data from user notifications from apps, email inboxes, and messages.

Oversecured published technical details of the vulnerabilities in a blog post, and said it reported the bugs to Samsung, which fixed the flaws.

Samsung confirmed the flaws affected “selected” Galaxy devices but would not provide a list of specific devices. “There have been no known reported issues globally and users should be assured that their sensitive information was not at risk,” but provided no evidence for this claim. “We addressed the potential vulnerability by developing and issuing security patches via software update in April and May, 2021 as soon as we identified this issue.”

The startup, which launched earlier this year after self-funding $1 million in bug bounty payouts, uses automation to search for vulnerabilities in Android code. Toshin has found similar security flaws in TikTok, and Android’s Google Play app.

When companies are considering buying a particular software service, they typically want to test it in their own environments, a process that can be surprisingly challenging. TestBox, a new startup, wants to change that by providing a fully working package with pre-populated data to give the team a way to test and collaborate on the product before making a buying decision.

Today the company announced it was making the product widely available and a $2.7 million seed round from SignalFire and Firstminute Capital along with several other investors and industry angels.

Company co-founder Sam Senior says he and his co-founder Peter Holland recognized that it was challenging for companies buying software to test it in a realistic way. “So TestBox is the very first time that companies are going to be able to test drive multiple pieces of enterprise software with an insanely easy-to-use live environment that’s uniquely configured to them with guided walk-throughs to make it really easy for them to get up to speed,” Senior explained.

He says that up until now, even with free versions or free testing periods, it was hard to test and collaborate in that kind of environment with key stakeholders in the company. TestBox comes pre-populated with data generated by GPT-3 OpenAI to test how the software behaves and lets participants grade different features on a simple star rating system and provide comments as needed. All the feedback is recorded in a “notebook,” giving the company a central place to gather all the data.

What’s more, it puts the company buying the software more in control of the process instead of being driven by the vendor, which is typically the case. “Actually, now [the customer gets to] be the one who defines the experience, making them lead the process, while making it collaborative, and giving them more confidence [in their decision],” he said.

For now, the company plans to concentrate on customer support software and is working with Zendesk, Hubspot and Freshdesk, but has plans to expand and add additional partners over time. It has been talking with Salesforce about adding Service Cloud and hopes to have them in some form on the platform later this year. It also plans to expand into other verticals over time like CRM, Martech and IT help desks.

Senior is a former Bain consultant who worked with companies buying enterprise software, and saw the issues first-hand that they faced when it came to testing software before buying. He quit his job last summer, and began by talking to 70 customers, vendors and experts to get a real sense of what they were looking for in a solution.

He then teamed up with Holland and built the first version of the software before raising their seed money last October. The company began hiring in February and has 8 employees to this point, but he wants to keep it pretty lean through the early stage of the company’s development.

Even at this early stage, the company is already taking a diverse approach to hiring. “Already when we have been working with recruiting firms, we’ve been saying that they need to split the pipeline as much as they can, and that’s been something we have spent a long, long time on. […] We spent actually six months with an open role on the front end because we are looking to build more diversity in our team as quickly as possible,” he said.

He reports that the company has a fairly equitable gender and ethnic split to this point, and holds monthly events to raise awareness internally about different groups, letting employees lead the way when it makes sense.

At least for now, he’s planning on running the company in a distributed manner, but acknowledges that as it gets bigger, he may have to look at having a centralized office as a home base, at least.

InfoSum, a startup which takes a federated approach to third party data enrichment, has launched a new product (called InfoSum Bridge) that it says significantly expands the customer identity linking capabilities of its platform.

“InfoSum Bridge incorporates multiple identity providers across every identity type — both online and offline, in any technical framework — including deterministic, probabilistic, and cohort-level matches,” it writes in a press release.

It’s also disclosing some early adopters of the product — naming data-for-ads and data-aggregator giants Merkle, MMA and Experian as dipping in.

Idea being they can continue to enrich (first party) data by being able to make linkages, via InfoSum’s layer, with other ‘trusted partners’ who may have gleaned more tidbits of info on those self-same users.

InfoSum says it has 50 enterprise customers using InfoSum Bridge at this point. The three companies it’s named in the release all play in the digital marketing space.

The 2016-founded startup (then called CognitiveLogic) sells customers a promise of ‘privacy-safe’ data enrichment run via a technical architecture that allows queries to be run — and insights gleaned — across multiple databases yet maintains each pot as a separate silo. This means the raw data isn’t being passed around between interested entities. 

Why is that important? Third party data collection is drying up, after one (thousand) too many privacy scandals in recent years — combing with the legal risk attached to background trading of people’s data as a result of data protection regimes like Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation.

That puts the spotlight squarely on first party data. However businesses whose models have been dependent on access to big data about people — i.e. being able to make scores of connections by joining up information on people from different databases/sources (aka profiling) — are unlikely to be content with relying purely on what they’ve been able to learn by themselves.

This is where InfoSum comes in, billing itself as a “neutral data collaboration platform”.

Companies that may have been accustomed to getting their hands on lashings of personal data in years past, as a result of rampant, industry-wide third party data collection (via technologies like tracking cookies) combined with (ehem) lax data governance — are having to cast around for alternatives. And that appears to be stoking InfoSum’s growth.

And on the marketing front, remember, third party cookies are in the process of going away as Google tightens that screw…

“We are growing faster than Slack (at equivalent stage e.g. Series A->B) because we are the one solution that is replacing the old way of doing things,” founder Nick Halstead tells TechCrunch. “Experian, Liveramp, Axciom, TransUnion, they all offer solutions to take your data. InfoSum is offering the equivalent of the ‘Cisco router for customer data’ — we don’t own the data we are just selling boxes to make it all connect.”

“The announcement today — ‘InfoSum Bridge’ — is the next generation of building the ultimate network to ‘Bridge the industry chasm’ it has right now of 100’s of competing ID’s, technical solutions and identity types, bringing a infrastructure approach,” he adds.

We took a deep dive into InfoSum’s first product back in 2018 — when it was just offering early adopters a glimpse of the “art of the possible”, as it put it then.

Three+ years on it’s touting a significantly expansion of its pipeline, having baked in support for multiple ID vendors/types, as well as adding probabilistic capabilities (to do matching on users where there is no ID).

Per a spokesman: “InfoSum Bridge is an extension of our existing and previous infrastructure. It enables a significant expansion of both our customer identity linking, and the limits of what is possible for data collaboration in a secure and privacy-focused manner. This is a combination of new product enhancements and announcement of partnerships. We’ve built capabilities to support across all ID vendors and types but also probabilistic and support for those publishers with unauthenticated audiences.”

InfoSum bills its platform as “the future of identity connectivity”. Although, as Halstead notes, there is now growing competition for that concept, as the adtech industry scrambles to build out alternative tracking systems and ID services ahead of Google crushing their cookies for good.

But it’s essentially making a play to be the trusted, independent layer that can link them all.

Exactly what this technical wizardry means for Internet users’ privacy is difficult to say. If, for example, it continues to enable manipulative microtargeting that’s hardly going to sum to progress.

InfoSum has previously told us its approach is designed to avoid individuals being linked and identified via the matching — with, for exmaple, limits placed on the bin sizes. Although its platform is also configurable (which puts privacy levers in its customers hands). Plus there could be edge cases where overlapped datasets result in a 100% match for an individual. So a lot is unclear.

The security story looks cleaner, though.

If the data is properly managed by InfoSum (and it touts “comprehensive independent audits”, as well as pointing to the decentralized architecture as an advantage) that’s a big improvement on — at least — one alternative scenario of whole databases being passed around between businesses which may be (to put it politely) disinterested in securing people’s data themselves.

InfoSum’s PR includes the three canned quotes (below) from the trio of marketing industry users it’s disclosing today.

All of whom sound very happy indeed that they’ve found a way to keep their “data-driven” marketing alive while simultaneously getting to claim it’s “privacy-safe”…

John Lee, Global Chief Strategy Officer, Merkle: “The conversation around identity is continuing to be top of mind for marketers across the industry, and as the landscape rapidly changes, it’s essential that brands have avenues to work together using first-party identity and data in a privacy-safe way. The InfoSum Bridge solution provides our clients and partners a way to collaborate using their first-party data, resolved to Merkury IDs and data, with even greater freedom and confidence than with traditional clean room or safe haven approaches.”

Lou Paskalis, Chairman, MMA Global Media and Data Board: “As marketers struggle to better leverage their first-party data in the transition from the cookie era to the consent era, I would have expected more innovative solutions to emerge.  One bright spot is InfoSum, which offers a proprietary technology to connect data, yet never share that data. This is the most customer-friendly and compliant technology that I’ve seen that enables marketers to fully realize the true potential of their first party data. What InfoSum has devised is an elegant way to respect consumers’ privacy choices while enabling marketers to realize the full benefit of their first party data.”

Colin Grieves, Managing Director Experian: “At Experian we are committed to a culture of customer-centric data innovation, helping develop more meaningful and seamless connections between brands and their audiences. InfoSum Bridge gives us a scalable environment for secure, data connectivity and collaboration. Bridge is at the core of the Experian Match offering, which allows brands and publishers alike the ability to understand and engage the right consumers in the digital arena at scale, whilst safeguarding consumer data and privacy.”

Thing is, clever technical architecture that enables big data fuelled modelling and profiling of people to continue, via pattern matching to identify ‘lookalike’ customers who can (for example) be bucketed and targeted with ads, doesn’t actually sum to privacy as most people would understand it… But, for sure, impressive tech architecture guys.

The same issue attaches to FloCs, Google’s proposed replacement for tracking cookies — which also relies on federation (and which the EFF has branded a “terrible idea”, warning that such an approach actually risks amplifying predatory targeting).

The tenacity with which the marketing industry seeks to cling to microtargeting does at least underline why rights-focused regulatory oversight of adtech is going to be essential if we’re to stamp out systematic societal horrors like ads that scale bias by discriminating against protected groups, or the anti-democratic manipulation of voters that’s enabled by opaque targeting and hyper-targeted messaging, circumventing the necessary public scrutiny.

Tl;dr: Privacy is not just important for the individual. It’s a collective good. And keeping that collective commons safe from those who would seek to exploit it — for a quick buck or worse — is going to require a whole other type of oversight architecture.

Investors placing capital in earlier and earlier tech deals has been a historical trend for the last few years, but this strategy was generally reserved for the traditional, ‘high-growth’ VC arena. VCs needed to snag earlier ad earlier deals otherwise they would be diluted at a later stage. But with startups coming up with models which can book revenues faster, they have increasingly less need for the VC deal which typically leaves founders with less control and less equity than the newly-ensconced VC on their board. That said, capital at this early stage for ‘growth-based’ startups was often hard to come by. Thus, the ‘early growth fund’ has been invented to address this issue.

Now, the latest arrival in this arena is Balderton, one of the Europe’s top VC funds, with may uicorns uder its belt.

Balderton has now launched a $680M ‘early growth’ fund to invest in high-potential tech companies, targeting around 15 companies at the early-growth stage, sector agostic.

It plans to invest between $25m and $50m per company through both primary and secondary investments. The fund will be lead by Bernard Liautaud, David Thévenon, and Rana Yared.

Since its founding in 2000, Balderton has raised $4bn to invest in European startups and backed more than 230 companies, primarily at the Series A stage. Its investments include Depop, GoCardless, Infarm, Revolut, THG, Vestiaire Collective, and Zego. The firm’s ‘Liquidity I’ portfolio also includes Darktrace, Flywire, Graphcore, and Truecaller.

Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner said: “I’ve been an investor at Balderton since 2008, and it has been incredible to see the increasing number of ambitious European founders, and to be able to support them financially through those critical first three to five years with our early stage funds. With this Growth Fund, we can now support them as they scale to become global industry leaders. We predict a $50 billion growth opportunity in Europe in the next three years alone, and we want to be the first choice for those ambitious founders.” 

Rana Yared, General Partner, added: “Our approach for this fund will be ‘one of few’. This means personalised attention from the entire partnership, plus access to Balderton’s leading platform team. We’re looking for fifteen or so really exceptional companies that have the potential to be sector leaders and disrupt global industries.”

We’re digging into the final IPO prices set by fintech unicorn Marqeta and enterprise productivity unicorn Monday.com this morning. Briefly, it’s good news.

A small programming note: The Exchange is off next week. I am taking some time to do nothing other than eat, read books and lose at lawn games. Regular service will resume the week after.

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To catch up on this busy IPO week, Marqeta, Monday.com and two other IPOs are on the docket. The final pair are Zeta Global and 1stDibs, debuts that matter, if a bit less so for our purposes than the others.

We’ll unpack the final price of each, comparing it to its IPO valuation range and drawing a few conclusions about where we stand in the larger unicorn liquidity cycle.

This is familiar ground for us, but given the sheer flow of IPOs we cannot sit back and presume that our knowledge is current; things are happening with enough speed that regular revisions of our market views are key.

And we may have been too conservative before, so we have a bit of clean-up ahead of us.

Strong pricing

Why do we care about IPO pricing? After all, the DoorDash and Airbnb IPOs showed that the value at which a company opens life as a public entity can wildly differ from where bankers estimated it should be valued.

Two quick things: First, IPO pricing sets the terms for the floating company’s fundraise; IPOs are fundraising events that often take the place of one last private round, so their price matters from a dilution perspective. And a lot of the hottest IPOs from the last six months have given back some of their early gains, making their official IPO price relevant.

DoorDash, for example, priced at $102 before soaring as high as $256 per share after its debut. Today, the company is worth $135.50 in pre-market trading. That’s a lot closer to its IPO price than we might have anticipated after watching its first days as a floating stock.

So, this stuff really does matter, and the numbers that we see below will help private companies price their next venture rounds. Furthermore, strong public market pricing could help keep alive the current game of wealthy private groups like Tiger hunting ever-earlier-stage startups with promising — if nascent — growth rates.

Waymo will be moving freight for a major customer of transportation logistics company J.B. Hunt Transport Services under what the two companies are calling a “test run” that will take place in one of the country’s busiest trade corridors.

Waymo Via, the company’s trucking and cargo transportation service, will transport goods along Interstate 45 between Houston and Fort Worth, Texas. The trucks will be powered by the Waymo Driver autonomous platform, though a Waymo “autonomous specialists,” a commercially-licensed truck driver and a software technician will be riding in each truck to monitor the operations.

This is not the first time J.B. Hunt and Waymo, an Alphabet subsidiary, have worked together. It seems the companies have been preparing for a trial deployment of autonomous trucks for some time.

“We’ve also worked closely with J.B. Hunt for some time now on operational and market studies and will continue to do so as we roll out autonomous driving technology,” Waymo said in a blog post. “We’ve explored topics such as best practices for regular maintenance, what future facility layouts will look like, and which lanes are best suited for autonomous driving technology, to help ensure long-term preparedness on both sides.”

Waymo declined to share with TechCrunch the specific number of trucks that will be used for the test run, but a spokesperson said that it will be a limited duration pilot “with the goal of jointly developing a long term plan for how our companies can work together.”

Waymo Driver is a Level 4 platform, meaning that it could theoretically operate without a human safety driver behind the wheel, but only under certain conditions (like clear weather).

The autonomous driving company has also partnered with Daimler Trucks to equip Daimler freightliners with the Waymo Driver. That’s in addition to partnerships with Volvo to develop electric robotaxis, and Fiat Chrysler Automobiles for autonomous cargo vans.

Fixed-term-funds (FTFs) have historically been a bank-to-bank market. FTF products allow for investing into some of the safest assets including, UK Government bonds, US Government bonds and highly-rated corporations. They allow holders of large amounts of cash (such as charities, private funds, family offices etc) to reduce and diversify their risk, but also increasing returns.

TreasurySpring is a fintech startup that is aiming to opening up access to this area of financial markets, by creating a Fixed-Term Fund platform. It’s now raised a $10 million Series A investment round co-led by MMC Ventures and Anthemis Group. Existing investors, including ETFS Capital, participated, taking the total its raised to $15 million.

TreasurySpring says its FTF platform gives holders of large cash balances online access to a menu of proprietary cash investments on a daily basis. This gives them access to an asset class that is usually only available to major financial institutions.

Founded in 2016 by Kevin Cook (CEO), Matthew Longhurst and James Skillen, Cook said in a statement: “Following a break-out 12 months in which we increased AUM by 10x, we wanted to bring in the best possible investment partners to support our ambitious growth plans. We have long admired both Anthemis Group and MMC, so I am delighted that they co-led the round and we are excited to work with Sean, Ollie and their respective teams, as we move into the next phase of our journey to redefine cash investment and front-office treasury.”

Given the current low and negative interest rates and an uncertain global financial outlook, TreasurySpring says its platform is likely to appeal as an alternative to traditional bank deposits and money market funds. It says it’s now issued more than $9B of FTFs to a client base which includes FTSE 100 and other listed companies, fund managers, large private companies, charities, and family offices.

Yann Ranchere, partner at Anthemis Group said: “With its ambitious and mission-driven team, TreaurySpring is opening the traditional money market industry to a whole new pool of participants.”

Oliver Richards, partner at MMC Ventures added: “Having worked with the team at TreasurySpring for the last two years, we have absolute confidence in their ability to deliver on their unique vision to level the playing field in cash investing and short-term funding, through a platform that not only brings value to its clients and issuers but also enhances the diversification and systemic stability of the money markets as a whole.”

Does TreasurySpring have any direct competitors? The compay sdays not. That said, bank deposits and money market funds are still the only tools available to most holders of large cash balances, so the banks and asset managers that offer these products are competitors, “to an extent” admits the firm. Howeverr, they are also “collaborators in many instances.”

Cook said: “Adoption of the platform is being driven by a realisation that the risks and returns of the traditional [deposit and MMF] options are becoming ever less attractive, whilst building out the infrastructure to do anything else is complex, cumbersome, time consuming and expensive.”

RSA Security has spun out its fraud and risk intelligence business into a standalone company called Outseer that will double down on payment security tools amid an “unprecedented” rise in fraudulent transactions.

Led by CEO Reed Taussig, who was appointed head of RSA’s Anti-Fraud Business Unit last year after previously serving as CEO of ThreatMetrix, the new company will focus solely on fraud detection and management and payments authentication services.

Outseer will continue to operate under the RSA umbrella and will inherit three core services, which are already used by more than 6,000 financial institutions, from the company: Outseer Fraud Manager (formerly RSA Adaptive Authentication), a risk-based account monitoring service; 3-D Secure (formerly Adaptive Authentication for eCommerce), a card-not-present and digital payment authentication mapping service; and FraudAction, which detects and takes down phishing sites, dodgy apps and fraudulent social media pages.

Outseer says its product portfolio is supported by deep investments in data and science, including a global network of verified fraud and transaction data, and a risk engine that the company claims delivers 95% fraud detection rates.

Commenting on the spinout, Taussig said: “Outseer is the culmination of decades of science-driven innovation in anti-fraud and payments authentication solutions. As the digital economy continues to deepen, the Outseer mission to liberate the world from transactional fraud is essential. Our role as a revenue enabler for the global economy will only strengthen as every digital business continues to scale.”

RSA, meanwhile, will continue to focus on integrated risk management and security products, including Archer for risk management, NetWitness for threat detection and response, and SecureID for identity and access management (IAM) capabilities.

The spinout comes less than a year after private equity firm Symphony Technology Group (STG), which recently bought FireEye’s product business for $1.2 billion, acquired RSA Security from Dell Technologies for more than $2 billion. Dell had previously acquired RSA as part of its purchase of EMC in 2016.

It also comes amid a huge rise in online fraud fueled by the COVID-19 pandemic. The Federal Trade Commission said in March that more than 217,000 Americans had filed a coronavirus-related fraud report since January 2020, with losses to COVID-linked fraud totaling $382 million. Similarly, the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau fielded 542,300 fraud complaints in 2020, a 54% increase over 2019.

RSA said that with the COVID-19 pandemic having fueled “unprecedented” growth in fraudulent transactions, Outseer will focus its innovation on payments authentication, mapping to the EMV 3-D Secure 2.x payment standard, and incorporating new technology integrations across the payments and commerce ecosystem. 

“Outseer’s reason for being isn’t just focused on eliminating payments and account fraud,” Taussig added. “These fraudulent transactions are often the pretext for more sinister drug and human trafficking, terrorism, and other nefarious behavior. Outseer has the ability to help make the world a safer place.”

Valuation information for Outseer was not disclosed, nor were headcount figures mentioned in the spinout announcement. Outseer didn’t immediately respond to TechCrunch’s request for more information.