Author: azeeadmin

Along with the stock market, cryptocurrency is also seeing an uptick among retail investors in Indonesia. Pintu, a platform focused on first-time cryptocurrency buyers, announced today it has raised a $6 million Series A, led by Pantera Capital, Intudo Ventures and Coinbase Ventures.

Other participants in the round included Blockchain.com Ventures, Castle Island Ventures and Alameda Ventures.

The Indonesian Commodity Futures Trading Regulatory Agency (also known as Bappepti) began regulating Bitcoin and other cryptoassets as commodities two years ago, paving the way for licensed brokers like Pintu. Founded last year by Jeth Soetoyo to make it easier for first-time investors to purchase Bitcoin, Ethereum and other cryptocurrencies, Pintu is registered under Bappebti and the Ministry of Communication and Informatics as a licensed cryptoassets broker.

A wave of interest in capital investing during the COVID-19 pandemic, especially among millennials who want alternatives to keeping their money in low-yield savings accounts, spurred interest in investment apps like Ajaib, Bibit and Pluang, which have all recently raised funding.

Many first-time investors are also looking at cryptocurrencies. According to Pintu’s internal estimates, last year Indonesia processed $10 billion USD in cryptoassets transactions, mostly through retail investors.

Pintu chief operating officer Andrew Adjiputro told TechCrunch in an email that many Indonesian retail traders see crypto as an alternative investment asset class, and that the majority of retail investors are aged 20 to 35 years old. But the company is starting to see more older investors as crypto gains popularity.

“Based on our internal survey, in terms of public’s top of mind asset classes, we see crypto as a top three asset class in Indonesia, alongside gold and mutual funds,” he said.

Other Indonesian cryptocurrency exchanges include Indodax and Tokocrypto. When asked how Pintu differentiates, Adjiputro said it focuses on the mass market to reach mainly first-time crypto users, and its value proposition lies in its mobile-first app, easy user experience and educational materials developed by the company.

“For most Indonesians, the concept of investing and trading is new, because historically penetration in these categories have been so low,” he explained. “So what we’re seeing is also the opportunity to help Indonesians understand the concept of investing/trading and along the way leapfrog investments into other asset classes. What this means is that there is a large base of underserved first time investors that demand a simple and intuitive trading platform where they are handheld from the start to finish and also educated on the fundamentals of investing/trading on top of that of crypto.”

Pintu’s new funding will be used on marketing, hiring and product development.

The handling of user data in China has become a delicate matter for American tech companies operating in the country. Apple’s move to store the data of its Chinese customers in servers managed by a Chinese state-owned cloud service has stoked controversy in the West over the years. A recent New York Times investigation found that the setup could give the Chinese government easy access to Apple’s user data in China, compromising”, but Apple said it “never compromised the security” of its customers or their data.

Tesla, one of the few U.S. tech heavyweights that generate substantial revenues from China, is working out a similar data plan. The electric carmaker said it has established a data center in China to carry out the “localization of data storage,” with more data facilities incoming, the company announced through its account on microblogging platform Weibo. All data generated by Tesla vehicles sold in mainland China will be stored domestically.

Tesla is acting in response to new requirements drafted by the Chinese government to regulate how cameras- and sensors-enabled carmakers collect and utilized information. One of the requirements states that “personal or important data should be stored within the [Chinese] territory.”

It’s unclear what level of access Chinese authorities have to Tesla’s China-based data. In the case of Apple, the phone maker said it controlled the keys that protect the data of its Chinese customers.

Tesla recently fell out of favor with Chinese media and the public after a customer protested the carmaker’s faulted parts at an auto show in Shanghai, earning her widespread sympathy. Tesla also faces fierce competition from Chinese rivals like Nio and Xpeng, which are investing heavily in world-class designs and autonomous driving technology.

The American firm clearly wants the government’s good graces in its second-largest market. It appeared a few days ago at an industry symposium along with Baidu, Alibaba, research institutions, and think tanks to discuss the new vehicle policy proposed by the country’s cybersecurity watchdog.

“Important data” generated by vehicles as defined by the Chinese internet regulator include traffic conditions in military and government compounds; surveying and mapping data beyond what the government discloses; status of electric charging grids; face, voice, and car plate information; and any data deemed as affecting national security and public interest.

The regulations also urge car service providers to not track users by default, as well as inform them of the kinds of and reasons for data collection. If gathered, information should be anonymized and stored for only “the minimum period of time.”

With more people than ever before going online to pay for things and pay each other, startups that are building the infrastructure that enables these actions continue to get a lot of attention.

In the latest development, Paysend, a fintech that has built a mobile-based payments platform — which currently offers international money transfers, global accounts, and business banking and e-commerce for SMBs — has picked up some money of its own. The London-based startup has closed a round of $125 million, a sizable Series B that the company’s CEO and founder Ronnie Millar said it will be using both to continue expanding its business geographically, to hire more people, and to continue building more fintech products.

The funding is being led by One Peak, with Infravia Growth Capital, Hermès GPE, previous backer Plug and Play and others participating.

Millar said Paysend is not disclosing valuation today but described it as a “substantial kick-up” and “a great step forward in our position ahead towards unicorn status.”

From what I understand though, the company was valued at $160 million in its previous round, and its core metrics have gone up 4.5x. Doing some basic math, that gives the company a valuation of around $720 million, a figure that a source close to the company did not dispute when I brought it up.

Something that likely caught investors’ attention is that Paysend has grown to the size it is today — it currently has 3.7 million consumer customers using its transfer and global account services, and 17,000 small business customers, and is now available in 110 receiving countries — in less than four years and $50 million in funding.

There are a couple of notable things about Paysend and its position in the market today, the first being the competitive landscape.

On paper, Paysend appears to offer many of the same features as a number of other fintechs: money transfer, global payments, and banking and e-commerce services for smaller businesses are all well-trodden areas with companies like Wise (formerly “TransferWise”), PayPal, Revolut, and so many others also providing either all or a range of these services.

To me, the fact that any one company relatively off the tech radar can grow to the size that it has speaks about the opportunity in the market for more than just one or two, or maybe five, dominant players.

Considering just remittances alone, the WorldBank in April said that flows just to low- and middle-income countries stood at $540 million last year, and that was with a dip in volumes due to Covid-19. The cut that companies like Paysend make in providing services to send money is, of course, significantly smaller than that — business models include commission charges, flat fees, or making money off exchange rates; Paysend charges £1 per transfer in the UK. More than that, the overall volumes, and the opportunity to build more services for that audience, are why we’re likely to see a lot of companies with ambitions to serve that market.

Services for small businesses, and tapping into the opportunity to provide more e-commerce tools at a time when more business and sales are being conducted online, is similarly crowded but also massive.

Indeed, Paysend points out that there is still a lot of growing and evolution left to do. Citing McKinsey research, it notes that some 70% of international payments are currently still cash-to-cash, with fees averaging up to 5.2% per transaction, and timing taking up to an hour each for sender and recipient to complete transfers. (Paysend claims it can cut fees by up to 60%.)

This brings us to the second point about Paysend: how it’s built its services. The fintech world today leans heavily on APIs: companies that are knitting together a lot of complexity and packaging it into APIs that are used by others who bypass needing to build those tools themselves, instead integrating them and adding better user experience and responsive personalization around them. notes, is a little different from these, with a vertically integrated approach, having itself built everything that it uses from the ground up.

Millar — a Scottish repeat entrepreneur (his previous company Paywizard, which has rebranded to Singula, is a specialist in pay-TV subscriber management) — notes that Paysend has built both its processing and acquiring facilities. “Because we have built everything in-house it lets us see what the consumer needs and uses, and to deliver that at a lower cost basis,” he said. “It’s much more cost efficient and we pass that savings on to the consumer. We designed our technology to be in complete control of it. It’s the most profitable approach, too, from a business point of view.”

That being said, he confirmed that Paysend itself is not yet profitable, but investors believe it’s making the right moves to get there.

“We are excited by Paysend’s enormous growth potential in a massive market, benefiting from a rapid acceleration in the adoption of digital payments,” said Humbert de Liedekerke, managing partner at One Peak Partners, in a statement. “In particular, we are seeing strong opportunities as Paysend moves beyond consumers to serve business customers and expands its international footprint to address a growing need for fast, easy and low-cost cross border digital payments. Paysend has built an exceptional payment platform by maintaining an unwavering focus on its customers and constantly innovating. We are excited to back the entire Paysend team in their next phase of explosive growth.”

As of now, one fo the UK’s biggest and most active tech VCs has a new partner. Principal Colin Hanna has spearheaded several of Balderton’s deals in the past couple of years, and has now been appointed a Partner. But there’s a twist to this plot. He will be officially based in Berlin (where he’s lived since 2019), thus giving the VC a more powerful reach, being based, as it is, solely in London.

Hanna said: “Having been with Balderton for five years, I am humbled to now call my mentors my Partners. I look forward to strengthening Balderton’s unique approach from Berlin as we engineer serendipity for European founders with planet-scale ambition.”

Bernard Liautaud, Managing Partner of Balderton commented: “We are delighted to announce Colin’s promotion to Partner. Since he joined Balderton in 2016, Colin has had a significant impact on both Balderton and our portfolio… Colin has strengthened our position in DACH by establishing our permanent presence in Berlin and bringing in Shikha Ahluwalia, whom we are delighted to have. In addition, he was instrumental in the definition of the Balderton Sustainable Future Goals. We have no doubt Colin will be highly successful in his new role.”

The story does not end there, however. Joining him will be tech entrepreneur and founder Shikha Ahluwalia as an Associate covering the DACH region.

co-founded SBL, the D2C women’s fashion e-commerce company in India. Prior to that she was had a tech advisory boutique, and was previously with JP Morgan’s Investment Banking Division in London.

Balderton has 10 current investments across DACH including Contentful, Infarm, SOPHiA Genetics, McMakler, Demodesk, and vivenu.

Ahluwalia commented: “Over the past few years, I have seen the DACH start-up ecosystem evolve rapidly. We at Balderton believe the next European giant will be a technology company and know that the DACH ecosystem plays a significant role in helping form category-leading technology companies. As a former founder myself, I have first-hand experience with the unique challenges of running young businesses. I am excited to contribute and support founders on their own journey as part of Balderton Capital.”

Speaking to me over an interview Hanna said: “Shikha’s hiring deepens our commitment to the local Berlin ecosystem and to the DACH region more broadly. We have been actively supporting Founders in Germany for more than a decade.”

After spending his childhood in Jakarta and Hong Kong, and picking up a degree in Political Economy, Hanna has carved out a career in venture investing – at Balderton since July 4, 2016 – looking at it through the prism on the rise of urban living, grassroots-driven technologies like open source and crypto, and the political ramifications of technology.

He sits on the Board of companies like e-bikes startup VanMoof, Finoa (a crypto custodian), Rahko (quantum computing drug discovery, and helped lead on investments into Traefik and Luno and Vivenu).

One these you might pick up from all those is that they err towards the ‘purpose-driven’ side of the equation.

He told me: “I believe the next generation of Founders, particularly in Europe, care more about just their bank accounts and want to build companies that generate impact and are not afraid to take a view on how they want the world to change. Measuring this is a challenge and something we are trying to do with our SFGs at Balderton which I helped spearhead. I believe that when companies like Coinbase and others go “apolitical” they commit themselves to defending the structural status quo rather than becoming agents of deliberate change.”

“My point about purpose driven companies is that when I think when employees want to work with companies believe in their values and you try to tell them those aren’t important, that could be viewed as political. I don’t think we should be we should be muffling the employees.”

Does he think Coinbase, and also recent more recently Basecamp / 37 Signals were wrong to so-called ‘depoliticize’ their businesses?

“I think, I think every CEO is free to run their company how they see fit. But I think that that poses challenges for them on the talent side. I understand, as an American, how charged and how destructive the political climate became, and so I can really understand and empathize why certain choices were made at that time, because you get to a point where that where the conversation becomes toxic… I hope that the steps that they’ve taken, don’t strangle dialogue and conversation that’s constructive about how we want to make an impact and change the world, either as individuals or with the companies we work for,” he said.

Hanna also told me that he think VCs should be wary that the shift to remote will make it easier to invest more widely. “You have to more background checks on founders now, and things like that. But is it a ‘little bit’ more dangerous or is it ‘50% more dangerous’ the fact that people aren’t meeting up in person?”

French startup Matera has announced that is has raised a new $43 million (€35 million) Series B funding round led by Mubadala Capital. Bpifrance, Burda Principal Investments as well as existing investors Index Ventures and Samaipata are also participating.

The company is building a vertical SaaS for residential property management. In France, co-owners of the common space of a building can decide to ditch the company that handles residential building management for them and do it themselves.

And it could work particularly well for small buildings with 10 or 15 apartments. There are fewer relationships to manage, fewer bills to pay and less work in general.

When co-owners vote to switch to Matera, they get a web-based platform and a mobile app to view information and see all the contracts with various partners — think about elevator maintenance, heating maintenance, water, electricity, etc.

If something feels odd, you can contact a residential building expert on Matera. They can help you make sure you comply with the law and file paperwork for you.

The platform also guides you when it comes to leading an annual co-owner meeting. It can help you communicate with all co-owners with a forum, an on-demand letter service, etc. Essentially, all co-owners get their own login information.

In October 2020, the company launched a new service to tackle a bigger chunk of the building management stack. Matera clients can now decide to manage their building’s bank account through the platform. This way, co-owners pay directly on Matera and everybody can keep track of the budget over time.

With today’s funding round, Matera plans to expand to Germany. The startup has been growing rapidly as it now manages 3,000 buildings, representing a 300% year-over-year jump. Overall, 60,000 owners use Matera.

“This past year gave us the opportunity to prove the relevance of our model and our value proposition, showing why Matera is the perfect solution for our times. The crisis sped up the digital transformation of our market, while at the same time increasing the attachment to our homes and buildings,” co-founder and CEO Raphaël di Meglio said in a statement. “Our clients wanted more transparency, and to save money and that’s exactly what we can bring them.”

By the end of 2021, Matera wants to manage 6,000 buildings including 40 in Germany. The company currently has 200 employees and plans to hire another 50 employees.

WhatsApp is suing the Indian government over new regulations in India that could allow authorities to make people’s messages “traceable,” conduct mass surveillance and undermine users’ privacy.

The instant messaging service, which identifies India as its biggest market, said it filed the lawsuit in the High Court of Delhi on Wednesday. It said New Delhi’s “traceability” requirement, unveiled in February this year, violated citizens’ constitutional right to privacy.

“Civil society and technical experts around the world have consistently argued that a requirement to ‘trace’ private messages would break end-to-end encryption and lead to real abuse. WhatsApp is committed to protecting the privacy of people’s personal messages and we will continue to do all we can within the laws of India to do so,” WhatsApp said.

India first proposed WhatsApp to make software changes to make the originator of a message traceable in 2018. But its suggestion didn’t become the law until this year.

This is a developing story. More to follow…

Xiaomi, one of China’s high-profile tech firms that fell in the crosshairs of the Trump administration, has been removed from a U.S. government blacklist that designated it as a Communist Chinese Military Company.

The U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia has vacated the Department of Defence’s designation of Xiaomi as a CCMC in January, a document filed on May 25 shows.

In February, Xiaomi sued the U.S. government over its inclusion in the military blacklist. In March, the D.C. court granted Xiaomi a preliminary injunction against the DoD designation, which would have forbidden all U.S. persons from purchasing or possessing Xiaomi’s securities, saying the decision was “arbitrary and capricious.” The ruling was made to prevent “irreparable harm” to the Chinese phone maker.

Xiaomi has this to say about getting off the blacklist:

The Company is grateful for the trust and support of its global users, partners, employees and shareholders. The Company reiterates that it is an open, transparent, publicly traded, independently operated and managed corporation. The Company will continue to provide reliable consumer electronics products and services to users, and to relentlessly build amazing products with honest prices to let everyone in the world enjoy a better life through innovative technology.

Xiaomi’s domestic competitor Huawei is still struggling with its inclusion in the U.S. trade blacklist, which bans it from accessing critical U.S. technologies and has crippled its smartphone sales around the world.

Investors are backing Koo, an Indian alternative to Twitter, with large size checks at a time when tension is brewing between the American social network and New Delhi.

The Indian startup said on Wednesday it has raised $30 million in a financing round led by Tiger Global Management. Mirae Asset and IIFL’s venture capital fund and existing investors 3one4 Capital, Blume Ventures, and Accel also participated in the round, which valued the Bangalore-based startup at over $100 million, up from about $25 million in February.

Like Twitter, Koo app allows users to send out posts in English and half a dozen Indian languages. The app has gained popularity in India in recent months following flare-ups between Twitter and the Indian government after the San Francisco-headquartered firm refused to block accounts that criticized New Delhi and Prime Minister Narendra Modi earlier this year.

(The Indian government, like Singapore’s, also ordered Twitter and Facebook last week to take down posts that identified a new variant of the coronavirus as “Indian variant”. Also last week, New Delhi objected to Twitter’s labeling of some of its politicians’ tweets as manipulated media. Earlier this week, police in Delhi visited Twitter offices to “serve a notice.”)

Several prominent government officials — including Commerce Minister Piyush Goyal, Information and Broadcasting Minister Prakash Javadekar, Union Cabinet Minister Smriti Irani, Electronics and IT Minister Ravi Shankar Prasad — and many celebrities have signed up on Koo in recent months and urged their followers to follow suit.

Though the app, co-founded by Aprameya Radhakrishna (who also co-founded TaxiForSure, which was sold to local giant Ola; and is a prolific angel investor), has won the trust of investors, it is yet to gain ground.

One-year-old Koo app had fewer than 6 million monthly active users in India in April, according to mobile insight firm App Annie (data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch).

The startup says it aims to build a social network for the entire nation and not just a fraction of it. Twitter remains largely popular among users in urban cities in India.

Koo, whose initial traction has been credited to Hindu nationalists, is currently one of the handful of social networks that has complied with India’s new IT rules that grant New Delhi greater power to take down posts it deems offensive.

The revised IT rules, announced in February, would put an end to “double standards” by making platforms more accountable to the local law, government officials said then. Failure to comply might bereft social networks of safe harbor protection.

The deadline to comply with the new rules expires on Wednesday. Facebook, which identifies India as its largest market, said it “aims to comply” with the new rules, while Google said in a statement that it “respects” India’s legislative process.

Koo is the latest investment from Tiger Global in India this year. The hedge fund, which has backed over 20 Indian unicorns, has emerged as the most prolific investor in Indian startups in recent months, winning founders with its pace of investment, check size, and favorable terms.

Smart Eye, the publicly traded Swedish company that supplies driver monitoring systems for a dozen automakers, has acquired emotion-detection software startup Affectiva for $73.5 million in a cash-and-stock deal.

Affectiva, which spun out of the MIT Media Lab in 2009, has developed software that can detect and understand human emotion, which Smart Eye is keen to combine with its own AI-based eye-tracking technology. The companies’ founders see an opportunity to expand beyond driver monitoring systems — tech that is often used on conjunction with advanced driver assistance systems to track and measure awareness — and into the rest of the vehicle. Together, the technology could help them break into the emerging “interior sensing” market, which can be used to monitor the entire cabin of a vehicle and deliver services in response to the occupant’s emotional state.

Under the terms of the deal, $67.5 million will be paid with 2,354,668 new Smart Eye shares, of which 2,015,626 are to be issued upon closing of the transaction. The remaining 339,042 Smart Eye shares will be issued within two years of closing. About $6 million will be paid in cash once the deal closes in June 2021.

Affectiva and Smart Eye were competitors. A meeting at the technology trade show CES in 2020, put the two companies on a path to merge.

“Martin and I realized like, wow, we are on a path to compete with each other — and wouldn’t it be so much better if we joined forces?” Affective co-founder and CEO Dr. Rana el Kaliouby said in an interview Tuesday. “By joining forces, we kind of check all the boxes for what the OEMs are looking for with interior sensing, we leapfrog the competition, and we have an opportunity to do this better and faster than we could have done it on our own.”

Boston-based Affectiva brings its emotion detection software to the deal, which will allow Smart Eye to offer its existing automotive partners a variety of products. Smart Eye helps Affectiva move beyond the development and prototype work and into production contracts. Smart Eye has won 84 production contracts with 13 OEMs, including BMW and GM. Smart Eye, which has offices in Gothenburg, Detroit, Tokyo and Chongqing, China, also has a division that provides research organizations such as NASA with high-fidelity eye tracking systems for human factors research.

Smart Eye founder and CEO Martin Krantz said that European manufacturers building luxury and premium vehicles led the charge for driver monitoring systems.

“We see the same pattern repeating itself now for interior sensing,” Krantz said. “I think a large part of the early contracts will be European premium OEMs such as Mercedes, BMW, Audi, JLR, Porsche.” Krantz added that there are a number of other premium brands it will target in other regions, including Cadillac and Lexus.

The opportunity will initially be in passenger vehicles driven by humans and will eventually expand as greater levels of automated driving enter the market.

Affectiva, which employs 100 people at its offices in Boston and Cairo, also has another business unit that applies its emotion detection software to media analytics. This division, which will be part of the deal and will operate separately, is profitable, Kaliouby said, noting the software is used by 70% of the world’s largest advertisers to measure and understand emotional responses to media content.

The social video tool Promo.com just raised $16 million in a Series B round led by Getty Images, the company synonymous with stock imagery.

Brands, creators or whoever else might need some quick and dirty video content can search Promo.com for what they need, just like they would use a stock photography service. Getty offers its own library of stock videos as well, but Promo.com provides both the video clips and the tools for non-editors to craft a basic edit with a little bit of customization.

Brands can select an existing professional video clip from a library, plug in their own message and add a logo or custom audio. All that’s left is downloading the customized video and whisking it off to their social channels.

Mizrahi Tefahot Bank, one of the largest banks in Israel, also participated in the Series B round through debt financing. Promo.com’s existing “strategic partnership” with Getty Images will deepen as part of the deal, giving the former company access to the latter’s expansive existing pool of video clips.

Image Credits: Screenshot/Promo.com

Of course, Promo.com isn’t the only show in town. Video creation platform Biteable raised $7 million of its own in December, and similarly allows companies to make bright, bite-sized video content for social. The super streamlined graphic design platform Canva also supports video editing with its own library of stock images. Vimeo offers its own video template service too, known as Vimeo Create, which grew out of the company’s acquisition of the AI-powered video editor Magisto.