Author: azeeadmin

This morning Airbase, a corporate spend startup, announced that it has closed a $60 million Series B led by Menlo Ventures. The deal’s announcement comes after Divvy, another corporate-spend focused startup, sold to Bill.com for several billion dollars, and other unicorns in the space like Brex and Divvy each raised nine-figure rounds.

According to Airbase CEO Thejo Kote, his company’s round is not a response to the Divvy sale. Instead, he told TechCrunch in an interview, his company kicked off its fundraising process before that deal was announced.

Not that what Airbase undertook was a process in the traditional sense; Kote did not spend months schlepping a deck along Sand Hill Road, imbibing mediocre architecture, overdressed MBAs and good weather in equal quantities. Instead, he decided that his firm was open to raising more capital in April despite having capital in the bank from previous investments, and 10 days later had signed a term sheet with Menlo.

Menlo partner and new Airbase board member Matt Murphy told TechCrunch in a separate interview that his firm had had its eye on the company for some time before its deal, allowing it to move quickly when Kote opened the door to more funding. (Murphy was candid in sharing that he had spent quite some time getting in front of Airbase, which we pass along as evidence of just how competitive the venture capital market can be in 2021.)

According to Kote, his firm’s new capital was raised on a $600 million valuation, post-money, which means that the Menlo-led transaction involved 10% of the company’s shares.

A segmenting market

TechCrunch’s coverage of the corporate spend market has largely focused on the revenue growth of the competing players, and their decision to either charge for the software that they offer along with corporate cards or not. But Kote views the market as segmenting in a somewhat different manner, namely along target customer scale. Divvy, for example, went after SMBs, while Airbase has more of a mid-market focus.

The customer targeting matters, with Kote telling TechCrunch that mid-market companies are looking for a single solution to replace various point-services that they have traditionally paid for. In the case of corporate spend, that could mean that many companies are willing to pay for new software so long as it can replace several services that they were buying discretely before; say, corporate cards and expense management software.

Kote said that the Divvy-Bill.com news was a “massive validation” of his company’s thesis that software would prove key in the market formerly focused on corporate cards, and that offering cards was itself a “race to the bottom.”

In the view of Airbase’s CEO, his company has a six to eight quarter lead on its competitors in product terms. The market will vet that perspective, but the company’s confidence in its vision and new capital should provide it with ample opportunity to prove out its thesis in the coming quarters, and see whether where it views its product in terms of market positioning viz. demand and competitors is correct.

The investor perspective

Menlo Ventures seems to think so, to the tune of its largest single check to date from a non-growth fund. What did Murphy et al. find so compelling about the company? In the investor’s view, Airbase has a shot at replacing point-solutions in mid-market companies, precisely as Kote imagines:

Airbase consolidates all the different spend apps which greatly decreases complexity in workflows as finance teams previously had to jump from app to app and don’t have a real time, holistic view in one place. […] Of course there is an advantage in not having to pay for multiple apps, but the biggest benefits are simplicity of workflows which is where we heard most of the product love.

Murphy continued, adding that at many companies “a manager won’t know until after [a quarter ends] whether the team for example spent above or below budget,” which makes integrated solutions more attractive.

Why does the viewpoint matter? It implies that the market that Airbase can sell into is rather large; instead of considering the aggregate non-payroll spend that its possible customer companies may generate and then applying an interchange vig to the total to calculate its potential scale, we might tabulate mid-market software spend on expenses, accounting and other categories as the startup’s true TAM. And as Airbase can still generate top-line from interchange and other sources, it could be well-situated for long-term growth.

Of course, its competitors are not interested in letting Airbase have all the fun. Ramp recently raised lots of capital, and is investing in its own software stack. With a free price point, it’s perhaps the most aggressive player on the interchange-first side of its market. And Brex is working to make lots of public noise, again, and has its own tower of cash, software focus and recently launched paid-SaaS service.

Now Airbase has more cash than it has ever had in its accounts, and has been busy hiring. The company has picked up a CFO, a general counsel and a VP of sales, from Mattermost, Robinhood and Dropbox, respectively.

Which all sounds very much like the long-term prep work for an eventual IPO. Set your timers for 2024.

In 2013, Colombian businessman David Velez decided to reinvent the Brazilian banking system. He didn’t speak Portuguese, nor was he an engineer or a banker, but he did have the conviction that the system was broken and that he could fix it. And as a former Sequoia VC, he also had access to capital.

His gut instinct and market analysis were right. Today, Nubank announced a $750 million extension to its Series G (which rang in at $400 million this past January), bringing the round to a total of $1.15 billion and their valuation to $30 billion — $5 billion more than when we covered them in January.

The extension funding was led by Berkshire Hathaway, which put in $500 million, and a number of other investors.

Velez and his team decided now was a good time to raise again, because, “We saw a great opportunity in terms of growth rate and we’re very tiny when compared to the incumbents,” he told TechCrunch.”

Nubank is the biggest digital bank in the world by number of customers: 40 million. The company started as a tech company in Brazil that offered only a fee-free credit card with a line of credit of R$50 (about USD$10). 

It now offers a variety of financial products, including a digital bank account, a debit card, insurance, P2P payment via Pix (the Brazilian equivalent of Zelle), loans, rewards, life insurance and an account and credit card for small business owners. 

Nubank serves unbanked or underserviced citizens in Brazil — about 30% of the population — and this approach can be extremely profitable because there are many more clients available.

The banking system in Brazil is one of the few bureaucracies in the country that is actually quite skillful, but the customer service remains unbearable, and banks charge exorbitant fees for any little transaction. 

Traditionally, the banking industry has been dominated by five major traditional banks: Itaú Unibanco, Banco do Brasil, Bradesco, Santander and Caixa Economica Federal. 

While Brazil remains Nubank’s primary market, the company also offers services in Colombia and Mexico (services launched in Mexico in 2018). The company still only offers the credit card in both countries.

“The momentum we’re seeing in Mexico is terrific. Our Mexican credit card net promoter score (NPS) is 93, which is the highest we’ve had in Nubank history. In Brazil the highest we’ve had was 88,” Velez said.

The company has been on a hiring spree in the last few months, and brought on two heavyweight executives. Matt Swann replaced Ed Wible (the original CTO and co-founder). Wible continues to be an important player in the company, but more in a software developer capacity. Swann previously served as CTO at Bookings.com and StubHub, and as CIO of the Global Consumer Bank at Citi, so he brings years of experience of scaling tech businesses, which is what Nubank is focused on now, though Velez wouldn’t confirm which countries are next.

The other major hire, Arturo Nunez, fills the new role of chief marketing officer. Nunez was head of marketing for Apple Latin America, amongst other roles with Nike and the NBA. 

It may sound a little odd for a tech company not to have had a head of marketing, but Nubank takes pride in having a $0 cost of acquisition (CAC). Instead of spending money on marketing, they spend it on customer service and then rely on word of mouth to get the word out.

Since we last spoke with Velez in January regarding the $400 million Series G, the company went from having 34 million customers to now having 40 million in a span of roughly 6 months. The funds will be used to grow the business, including hiring more people.

“We’ve seen the entire market go digital, especially people who never thought they would,” Velez said. “There is really now an avalanche of all backgrounds [of people] who are getting into digital banking.”

Countless popular websites including Reddit, Spotify, news outlets the Guardian, BBC, Financial Times are currently facing an outage. Typically an outage of this nature occurs when a vital internet infrastructure service faces an issue.

An apparent glitch at Fastly, a popular CDN provider, is thought to be the reason, according to a product manager of Financial Times.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Ford unveiled on Tuesday the Maverick, a new compact hybrid pickup truck for people who didn’t know they needed one.

The truck’s smaller more approachable size and its base price of $19,995 is geared towards entry-level customers who want that SUV or truck lifestyle as well as the ease of navigating and parking in tight urban centers. And while its not an all-electric truck like the upcoming Ford F-150 Lightning, the Maverick is part of the company’s recently expanded plan to invest $30 billion investment in electrification by 2025.

The Maverick also has the distinction of being equipped with the first electric motor designed, developed, tested and manufactured in-house at Ford’s Van Dyke Transmission Plant.

The compact pickup can more easily maneuver city parking.

The electric motor and accompanying 2.5 liter engine produces 191 horsepower, 155 pound-feet of torque, and it can tow up to 2,000 pounds. That might not be attractive to those looking to haul one of the larger fifth-wheel campers on the market today. But with a targeted EPA fuel economy of 40 mpg in the city, Ford should find takers. Ford is also offering an option of the EcoBoost engine with an 8-speed automatic, that gives the Maverick 250 horsepower, 277 pound-feet of torque and towing capabilities of up to 4,000 pounds.

The Maverick will come standard as a front-wheel drive and be available in three trims, including the XL, XLT and the Lariat — similar to the F-Series variants. All-wheel drive upgrades are available.

A bed that’s also a ‘makerspace’

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The bed of the truck comes in at a polite size of 4.5 feet height by 4 feet wide – as opposed to the F-150’s 5.5 by 4.3 foot bed — is designed to be flexible. Ford, which wanted to be sure to get that message across, has branded it “flexbed,” because it’s, well, flexible to a range of needs.

Ford’s most popular pickup trucks, the F-150 series, are geared towards utility by providing plenty of wattage and storage for power tools. The Maverick is made with the DIY driver in mind. Ford has placed 12 available anchor points and slots that lets the owner subdivide as they might want. This so-called flexbed is equipped with two 12-volt 20-amp prewired sources, plus two 110-volt outlets for powering a “laptop or tailgate party,” as Ford suggests in a statement announcing the new vehicle.

Speaking of tailgates, the Maverick’s is multi-positional, so the driver can adjust it to hold open at whatever position best suits whatever they’re hauling, giving the truck a bed extender functionality.

Another neat feature of the pickup being so small is that the bed is designed to be accessible by reaching over the bedside, and the designers specifically focused on ensuring things were within reach for the fifth percentile of female.

Let’s talk about tech

The Maverick is a fully connected vehicle, as we’ve come to expect with any new vehicle these days. Ford’s latest pickup has its own hotpot that can give blessed internet to up to 10 devices and it comes standard with Apple CarPlay and Android Auto. By connecting a smartphone, customers can access the FordPass app, which can be used to remote start the vehicle, lock and unlock doors, locate the truck and check fuel levels.

The compact pickup also has features of the Ford Co-Pilot 360, such as pre-collision assist with auto emergency braking, which alerts the driver through audio and visual signals. There are also high beam headlamps which flip on when no other cars are in front of you, a blindspot information system in case you just drift into another lane without checking over your shoulder, lane keep assist and adaptive cruise control. This tech also allows for five standard drive modes including normal, eco, sport, slippery and tow/haul.

Inside the Maverick

The pickup’s interior a has colorful accents that are used to denote a place that’s intended for human interface such as the center mat with a charging pad or the vents. Rather than fake leather and fake wood, the Maverick features stone-face textures and speckled plastic.

There are some Ford Integrated Tether Slots which allows for customers to mix and match with different accessories they want to add to the interior, like extra cupholders or an iPad holder to entertain the kiddos in the backseat. Because the fuel tank is located behind the cabin, rather than under the bench, customers have far more under-seat storage space. Apparently that cabin can even hold buckets of ice for that tailgate Ford was talking about earlier.

The Maverick has also done away with the arm rests on the doors and speakers on the back doors, allowing more space for those tall S’well water bottles everyone loves.

One of the lingering mysteries from Uber’s sale of its Uber ATG self-driving unit to Aurora has been solved.

Raquel Urtasun, the AI pioneer who was the chief scientist at Uber ATG, has launched a new startup called Waabi that is taking what she describes as an “AI-first approach” to speed up the commercial deployment of autonomous vehicles, starting with long-haul trucks. Urtasun, who is the sole founder and CEO, already has a long list of high-profile backers, including separate investments from Uber and Aurora. Waabi has raised $83.5 million in a Series A round led by Khosla Ventures with additional participation from Uber, 8VC, Radical Ventures, OMERS Ventures, BDC, Aurora Innovation as well as leading AI researchers Geoffrey Hinton, Fei-Fei Li, Pieter Abbeel, Sanja Fidler and others.

Urtasun described Waabi, which currently employs 40 people and operates in Toronto and California, as the culmination of her life’s work to bring commercially viable self-driving technology to society. The name of the company —  Waabi means “she has vision” in Ojibwe and “simple” in Japanese —  hints at her approach and ambitions.

Autonomous vehicle startups that exist today use a combination of artificial intelligence algorithms and sensors to handle the tasks of driving that humans do such as detecting and understanding objects and making decisions based on that information to safely navigate a lonely road or a crowded highway. Beyond those basics are a variety of approaches, including within AI.

Most self-driving vehicle developers use a traditional form of AI. However, the traditional approach limits the power of AI, Urtasun said, adding that developers must manually tune the software stack, a complex and time-consuming task. The upshot, Urtasun says: Autonomous vehicle development has slowed and the limited commercial deployments that do exist operate in small and simple operational domains because scaling is so costly and technically challenging.

“Working in this field for so many years and, in particular, the industry for the past four years, it became more and more clear along the way that there is a need for a new approach that is different from the traditional approach that most companies are taking today,” said Urtasun, who is also a professor in the Department of Computer Science at the University of Toronto and a co-founder of the Vector Institute for AI.

Some developers do use deep neural nets, a sophisticated form of artificial intelligence algorithms that allows a computer to learn by using a series of connected networks to identify patterns in data. However, developers typically wall off the deep nets to handle a specific problem and use a machine learning and rules-based algorithms to tie into the broader system.

Deep nets have their own set of problems. A long-standing argument is that can’t be used with any reliability in autonomous vehicles in part because of the “black box” effect, in which the how and the why the AI solved a particular task is not clear. That is a problem for any self-driving startup that wants to be able verify and validate its system. It is also difficult to incorporate any prior knowledge about the task that the developer is trying to solve, like say driving. Finally, deep nets require an immense amount of data to learn.

Urtasun says she solved these lingering problems around deep nets by combining them with probabilistic inference and complex optimization, which she describes as a family of algorithms. When combined, the developer can trace back the decision process of the AI system and incorporate prior knowledge so they don’t have to teach the AI system everything from scratch. The final piece is a closed loop simulator that will allow the Waabi team to test at scale common driving scenarios and safety-critical edge cases.

Waabi will still have a physical fleet of vehicles to test on public roads. However, the simulator will allow the company to rely less on this form of testing. “We can even prepare for new geographies before we even drive there,” Urtasun said. “That’s a huge benefit in terms of the scaling curve.”

Urtasun’s vision and intent isn’t to take this approach and disrupt the ecosystem of OEMs, hardware and compute suppliers, but to be a player within it. That might explain the backing of Aurora, a startup that is developing its own self-driving stack that it hopes to first deploy in logistics such as long-haul trucking.

“This was the moment to really do something different,” Urtasun said. “The field is in need of a diverse set of approaches to solve this and it became very clear that this was the way to go.”

On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Justice Department said it has seized much of the cryptocurrency ransom that  U.S. pipeline operator Colonial Pipeline paid last month to a Russian hacking collective called DarkSide by tracking the payment the as it moved through different accounts belonging to the hacking group and finally breaking into one of those accounts with the blessing of a federal judge.

It’s a feel-good twist to a saga that began with a cyberattack on Colonial and resulted in a fuel shortage made worse by the panic-purchasing of gasoline last month after Colonial shut down one of its major pipelines (and later suffered a second pipeline shutdown owing to what it described as an overworked internal server). But Christopher Alhberg, a successful serial entrepreneur and the founder of Recorded Future, a security intelligence company that tracks threats to the government and corporations and runs its own media arm, suggests that Americans have overestimated DarkSide all along. He explained a lot about the way its operations work last week in an interview that you can hear here. Shorter excerpts from that conversation follow, edited lightly for length.

TC: Broadly, how does your tech work?

CA: What we do is try to index the internet. We try to get in the way of data from everything that’s written on the internet, down to the electrons moving, and we try and index that in a way that it can be used for for people who are defending companies and defending organizations. . .  We try to get into the heads of the bad guys, get to the where the bad guys hang out, and understand that side of the equation. We try to understand what happens on the networks where the bad guys operate, where they execute their stuff, where they basically transmit data, where they run the illicit infrastructure — all of those things. And we also try to get in the way of the traces that the bad guys leave behind, which could be in all kinds of different interesting places.

TC: Who are your customers?

CA: We have about 1,000 of them in total, and they range from the Department of Defense to some of the largest companies in the world. Probably a third of our business is [with the] government, one third of our businesses are in the financial sector, then the rest [comprise] a whole set of verticals, including transportation, which has been big.

TC: You’re helping them predict attacks or understand what happened in cases where it’s too late?

CA: It can go both ways.

TC: What are some of the clues that inform your work?

CA: One is understanding the adversary, the bad guys, and they largely fall in two buckets: You’ve got cyber criminals, and you’ve got adversary intelligence agencies.

The criminals over the last month or two here that the world and us, too, have been focused on are these ransomware gangs. So these are Russian gangs, and when you hear ‘gang,’ people tend to think about large groups of people [but] it’s typically a guy or two or three. So I wouldn’t over estimate the size of these gangs.

[On the other hand] intelligence agencies can be very both well-equipped and [involve] large sets of people. So one piece is about tracking them. Another piece is about tracking the networks that they operate on . . Finally, [our work involves] understanding the targets, where we get data on the potential targets of a cyber attack without having access to the actual systems on premises, then tying the three buckets together in an automated fashion.

TC: Do you see a lot of cross pollination between intelligence agencies and some of these Russian cutouts?

CA: The short answer is these groups are not, in our view, being tasked on a daily or monthly or maybe even yearly basis by Russian intelligence. But in a series of countries around the world — Russia, Iran, North Korea is a little bit different, to some degree in China — what we’ve seen is that government has encouraged a growing hacker population that’s been able, in an unchecked way, to be able to pursue their interest — in Russia, largely — in cyber crime. Then over time, you see intelligence agencies in Russia — FSB, SVR and GRU —  being able to poach people out of these groups or actually task them. You can find in official documents how these guys have mixed and matched over a long period of time.

TC: What did you think when DarkSide came out soon after the cyberattack and said it could no longer access its Bitcoin or payment server and that it was shutting down?

CA: If you did this hack, you probably had zero idea what Colonial Pipeline actually was when you did it. You’re like, ‘Oh, shit, I’m all over the American newspapers.’ And there are probably a couple of phone calls starting to happen in Russia, where basically, again, ‘What the hell did you just do? How are you going to try to cover that up?’

One of the simplest first things you’re going to do is to basically say either, ‘It wasn’t me’ or you’re going to try to say, ‘We lost the money; we lost access to our servers.’ So I think that was probably fake that whole thing [and that] what they were doing was just to try to cover their tracks, [given that] we found them later come back and try to do other things. I think we overestimated the ability of the U.S. government to come rapidly right back at these guys. That will just not happen that fast, though this is pure conjuring. I’m not saying that with access to any inside government information or anything of the sort.

TC: I was just reading that DarkSide operates like a franchise where individual hackers can come and receive software and use it like a turnkey process. Is that new and does that mean that it opens up hacking to a much broader pool of people?

CA:  That’s right. One of the beauties of the Russian hacker underground is in its distributed nature. I’m saying ‘beauty’ with a little bit of sarcasm, but some people will write the actual ransomware. Some will use the services that these guys provide and then be the guys who might do the hacking to get into the systems. Some other guys might be the ones who operate the Bitcoin transactions through the Bitcoin tumbling that gets needed . . . One of the interesting points is that to get the cash out in the end game, these guys need to go through one of these exchanges that ended up being more civilized businesses, and there might be money mules involved, and there are people who run the money mules. A lot of these guys do credit card fraud; there’s a whole set of services there, too, including testing if a card is alive and being able to figure out how you get money out of it. There are probably 10, 15, maybe  20 different types of services involved in this. And they’re all very highly specialized, which is very much why these guys have been able to be so successful and also why it’s hard to go at it.

TC: Do they share the spoils and if so, how?

CA: They do. These guys run pretty effective systems here. Obviously, Bitcoin has been an incredible enabler in this because there is a way to do payments [but] these guys have whole systems for ranking and rating of themselves much like an eBay seller. There’s a whole set of these underground forums that have historically has been the places that these guys have been operating and they’ll including include services there for being able to say that somebody is a scammer [meaning in relation to the] thieves who are among the cyber criminals. It’s much like the internet. Why does the internet work so well? Because it’s super distributed.

TC: What’s your advice to those who aren’t your customers but want to defend themselves?

CA: A colleague produced a pie chart to show what industries are being hit by ransomware and what’s amazing is that it was just super distributed across 20 different industries. With Colonial Pipeline, a lot of people were like, ‘Oh, they’re coming from the oil.’ But these guys could care less. They just want to find the slowest moving target. So make sure you’re not the easiest target.

The good news is that there are plenty of companies out there doing the basics and making sure that your systems are patched [but also] hit that damn update button. Get as much of your stuff off the internet so that it’s not facing out. Keep as little surface area as you can to the outside world. Use good passwords, use multiple two-factor authentication on everything and anything that you can get your hands on.

There’s a checklist of 10 things that you’ve got to do in order to not be that easy target. Now, for some of these guys — the really sophisticated gangs — that’s not enough. You’ve got to do more work, but the basics will make a big difference here.

Cabify wants to own the way people in cities move. The Spanish-born ride-hailing company is rolling out a pilot multi-modal subscription model to 40,000 users in Madrid this week, with plans to expand to its other markets throughout Spain and Latin America.

The “Cabify Go!” subscription service appears to have something for everyone. All of Cabify’s different mobility offerings — ride-hailing service, electric micromobility subsidiary MOVO, bike subscription service Bive and courier service — are already available under one app, but now customers will also be able to select one of three plans that reflect the mobility needs of different users. Select users will now see a “Go!” button on the top-right corner of the screen. This is a step toward making the Cabify name ubiquitous among city dwellers planning a trip, whether they’re taking an old-fashioned taxi ride to the airport or are riding a scooter to work. 

“The subscription scheme ‘Cabify Go!’ is born to make our app their recurring platform, with diverse available services,” Leonor Barrueco, Cabify’s VP of growth, told TechCrunch. “This approach is strongly aligned with our goal of becoming the leading multi-mobility platform. At this stage there’s an opportunity to get closer to our users’ multiple and varying needs. We want to offer our users convenient, diverse and sustainable ways to move around the city at an affordable monthly fee.”

The main subscription offering, “Cabify Go! Todo en uno” or “Everything in one” plan, costs €6.95 per month and gives users a blanket 10% discount on all their Cabify trips, as well as 30% off Cabify Envíos, its courier service. Subscribers also get two free cancellations each month and are exempt from the additional fee incurred from high demand. 

Cabify is also offering the “A dos ruedas” or “On two wheels” plan, which costs €19.95 per month and includes 10 free MOVO rides of up to €6 without any additional cost. The mobility company expects subscriptions to help bring on new users. Currently, the rate of new users in Cabify’s moped segment is nearly 1.5 times higher than the ride-hailing services’ rate, according to Barrueco. 

“Given the convergence of the platform space where customers can demand a variety of booming multi-mobility services, some users might be new to alternative options whilst some are new to the whole multi-mobility ecosystem,” said Barrueco.

Finally, its “Pedelea” or “Pedal” plan includes the Bive long-term rental service for electric or mechanical bikes, with a competitive monthly price of €49.95 and €28.95, respectively. Servicing and maintenance is included, as well as a 10% discount on ride-hailing trips. 

Bive, which Cabify introduced about a year ago, has already spread from Madrid to Valencia, Sevilla and Barcelona. By integrating the service into Cabify’s subscription offerings, the company hopes to promote the Bive service through another outlet, an idea borne out by internal insights. Barrueca says that 50% of Bive’s user base are new users to the Cabify platform. 

There are no sign-up or cancellation fees for any of the services, and users can cancel at any time, according to Barrueco. But that’s par for the course when it comes to mobility subscriptions, which seem to be on the rise as the subscription business model grows to answer shifting consumption habits.

According to monetization tech developer Telecoming’s 2021 Subscronomics Report, in the European market, “with a base of 353 million households and more than 2,100 connected devices (22% of the total worldwide), 560 million subscriptions will be purchased this year (25% of the worldwide total).” This is expected to contribute to a global subscriptions industry of almost $228 billion, which is 31% higher than in 2020, with an average YOY growth of 23% from now until 2025. 

Other companies that have jumped on the monthly rental train early include Unagi with its e-scooters, Swapfiets with bikes and e-bikes and Onto with electric vehicles.

Barrueco says one of Cabify’s goals in increasing its own business is to contribute to the transformation of cities to be more people-centric and environmentally friendly by making shared modes of transport more accessible.

“One of the company’s top priorities is to ramp up and consolidate our multimobility service proposition which provides our users with diverse sustainable alternatives and aims to replace the dominance of the private car,” said Barrueco.

While the global share of EVs over Cabify’s entire fleet is only about 1%, with hybrid vehicles accounting for 3%, Cabify is targeting 2025 for full electrification for collaborating fleets in Spain, and 2030 in Latin America. The company is collaborating with a number of stakeholders, including IDB Invest, the Ministry of Energy in Chile and car brands to test suitable EV models.

“This common journey to the general adoption of EVs entails tackling a number of urban and sector-wide challenges such as the scarcity of EV models that are autonomy-wise compatible with ride-hailing services, battery life spans, legal certainty in access to credit or the characteristics and availability of charging points,” said Barrueco.

The rush to back lidar companies continues as more automakers and robotaxi startups include the remote sensing method in their vehicles.

Latest to the investment boom is Hesai, a Shanghai-based lidar maker founded in 2014 with an office in Palo Alto. The company just raised over $300 million in a Series D funding round led by GL Ventures, the venture capital arm of storied private equity firm Hillhouse Capital, smartphone maker Xiaomi, on-demand services giant Meituan and CPE, the private equity platform of Citic.

Hesai said the new proceeds will be spent on mass-producing its hybrid solid-state lidar for its OEM customers, the construction of its smart manufacturing center, and research and development on automotive-grade lidar chips. The company said it has accumulated “several hundred million dollars” in funding to date.

Other participants in the round included Huatai Securities, Lightspeed China Partners and Lightspeed Venture Capital, as well as Qiming Venture Partners. Bosch, Baidu, and ON Semiconductor are also among its shareholders.

Another Chinese lidar startup Innovusion, a major supplier to electric vehicle startup Nio, raised a $64 million round led by Temasek in May. Livox is another emerging lidar maker that was an offshoot of DJI.

Lidar isn’t limited to powering robotaxis and passenger EVs, and that’s why Hesai got Xiaomi and Meituan onboard. Xiaomi makes hundreds of different connected devices through its manufacturing suppliers that could easily benefit from industrial automation, to which sensing technology is critical. But the phone maker also unveiled plans this year to make electric cars.

Meituan, delivering food to hundreds of millions of consumers in China, could similarly benefit from replacing human riders with lidar-enabled unmanned vans and drones.

Hesai, with a staff of over 500 employees, says its clients span 70 cities across 23 countries. The company touts Nuro, Bosch, Lyft, Navya, and Chinese robotaxi operators Baidu, WeRide and AutoX among its customers. Last year, it kickstarted a partnership with Scale AI, a data labeling company, to launch an open-source data set for training autonomous driving algorithms, with data collected using Hesai’s lidar in California. 

Last July, Hesai and lidar technology pioneer Velodyne entered a long-term licensing agreement as the two dismissed legal proceedings in the U.S., Germany and China.

Apple announced a handful of privacy-focused updates at its annual software developer conference on Monday. One called Private Relay particularly piques the interest of Chinese users living under the country’s censorship system, for it encrypts all browsing history so nobody can track or intercept the data.

As my colleague Roman Dillet explains:

When Private Relay is turned on, nobody can track your browsing history — not your internet service provider, anyone standing in the middle of your request between your device and the server you’re requesting information from. We’ll have to wait a bit to learn more about how it works exactly.

The excitement didn’t last long. Apple told Reuters that Private Relay won’t be available in China alongside Belarus, Colombia, Egypt, Kazakhstan, Saudi Arabia, South Africa, Turkmenistan, Uganda and the Philippines.

Apple couldn’t be immediately reached by TechCrunch for comment.

Virtual private networks or VPNs are popular tools for users in China to bypass the “great firewall” censorship apparatus, accessing web services that are otherwise blocked or slowed down. But VPNs don’t necessarily protect users’ privacy because they simply funnel all the traffic through VPN providers’ servers instead of users’ internet providers, so users are essentially entrusting VPN firms with protecting their identities. Private Relay, on the other hand, doesn’t even allow Apple to see one’s browsing activity.

In an interview with Fast Company, Craig Federighi, Apple’s senior vice president of software engineering, explained why the new feature may be superior to VPNs:

“We hope users believe in Apple as a trustworthy intermediary, but we didn’t even want you to have to trust us [because] we don’t have this ability to simultaneously source your IP and the destination where you’re going to–and that’s unlike VPNs. And so we wanted to provide many of the benefits that people are seeking when in the past they’ve decided to use a VPN, but not force that difficult and conceivably perilous privacy trade-off in terms of trusting it a single intermediary.”

It’s unclear whether Private Relay will simply be excluded from system upgrades for users in China and the other countries where it’s restricted, or it will be blocked by internet providers in those regions. It also remains to be seen whether the feature will be available to Apple users in Hong Kong, which has seen an increase in online censorship in the past year.

Like all Western tech firms operating in China, Apple is trapped between antagonizing Beijing and flouting the values it espouses at home. Apple has a history of caving in to Beijing’s censorship pressure, from migrating all user data in China to a state-run cloud center, cracking down on independent VPN apps in China, limiting free speech in Chinese podcasts, to removing RSS feed readers from the China App Store.

Hey, founders between gigs: What now?

If you exited your last company for airplane money and are now independently wealthy, congratulations! If you want to build another company, just self-fund. If you want outside capital, VCs will chase after you to invest.

Unfortunately, most founders are not in that position: nine out of 10 startups fail. Even if you achieve a high valuation, you might end up like FanDuel’s founders: Their investors got the benefit of a $465 million exit; the founders got zero.

As someone with “founder” on your resume, you face a greater challenge when trying to get a traditional salaried job. You’ve already shown that you really want to lead a company and not just rise up the ladder, which means some employers are less likely to hire you. One research paper found:

[F]ormer founders receive fewer callbacks than non-founders; however, all founders are not disadvantaged similarly. Former founders of successful ventures receive even fewer [emphasis added] callbacks than former founders of failed ventures. Through 20 interviews with technical recruiters, we highlight the mechanisms driving this founder-experience discount: concerns related to the applicant’s capability and ability to fit into and remain committed to the wage employment and the hiring firm.

At my prior firm, ff Venture Capital, we invested in a company co-founded by Nate Jenkins, who had a successful exit, but not quite enough to buy a private plane. He’s now researching his next opportunity and interviewing for some jobs. At the end of a recent interview, the interviewer summarized, “I’ll hire you, but is this what you really want to do?”

That said, Samuel Sabin, CEO of HireBlue, observed, “Some founders who work better with more resources at their disposal may be tapped for intrapreneurship roles. Also, some companies value a self-starter mentality.”

So what should you do? Especially if your life partner and/or bank account are burnt out on the income volatility of startups?

I’ve been in this situation myself when I shut down one startup and exited two others. I think you have six main options:

Full-time initiatives

1. Launch a new company.
2. Get a job.

Part-time activities

1. Angel investing, venture capital and mentoring.
2. Consulting.
3. Sell information products.
4. Education and self-improvement.

At Versatile VC, our new VC fund, we’re creating an online community just for founders who are in transition, Founders’ Next Move. We hope you will join us!

Full-time initiatives

Launch a new company

If you want to work on your startup idea, the bar for starting a company should always be very high. VCs have a diversified portfolio and most of their investments die. You don’t have a diverse portfolio and so you’re taking far more risk than the VCs. For free resources to help research your ideas, see What startup will you build? Identifying market white space.