Author: azeeadmin

The University of California has always embraced the startup ecosystem in the state, including running a few of its own incubators and accelerators. Now Berkeley will have a huge new incubator of its own, Bakar Labs, which will host as many as 80 young companies a year and provide access university facilities and networks.

Hosted at the lovely brutalist Woon Hon Fai Hall, formerly the Berkeley Art Museum, the incubator is just part of the greater Bakar BioEnginuity Hub, an ongoing cross-disciplinary initiative within the university. It will be run by QB3, a pan-UC organization that organizes entrepreneurship efforts, and replaces a much smaller biotech-focused program at Berkeley.

Rather than provide a set curriculum of achieving product fit, building the team and so on that you might find at an accelerator, Bakar Labs will be more of a benevolent host with all the best toys. Berkeley is of course a world class research institution with an enviable faculty and extensive resources — and those in the incubator will have (limited) access to them.

Startups need not be affiliated with Berkeley in any way — the hub is hoping to attract founders from all over the place with its promise of inexpensive office and lab space and the aforementioned extensive resources. The term “incubator” seems apt for both the topic and the method — bring in the organisms, provide plenty of nutrients, and watch them grow.

The relatively hands-off approach applies to funding as well. Companies will pay for their places at the Labs, but there’s no contract to sign over equity or first rights to Berkeley or its associated organs. A QB3 representative explained that investments may still occur, through an affiliated VC fund, but that it’s not baked into the program.

There’s no connection with Berkeley’s Skydeck, another university entrepreneurship program that has produced some highly valued companies in and out of biotech. The team that will be helping select companies for Bakar Labs helped Skydeck with its biotech applicants, so it seems going forward like there will be a friendly bifurcation of streams.

As for entry, companies will be judged on their potential (both business and scientific), but the exact requirements and preferences will no doubt be flexible. Managing director of Bakar Labs Gino Segre explained that they would hope a company has more on its mind than either a buyout or a big paper.

“We encourage teams with a double bottom line to apply– they aim to better human health and are pursuing a profit-driven business model. Entrepreneurship for good,” he wrote in an email to TechCrunch. “We are already seeing interest in therapeutics, diagnostics, research tool, foodtech and agtech.”

“The strongest teams will be two to 15 people, with operating capital for at least 6 months, and are leveraging an innovative technology for which a lab is required to advance their program,” he continued. There’s no limit on how long startups can stay, but after a couple years you might wonder whether there’s been a failure to launch. Ideally the startup raises money and moves to its own office and lab, but until that’s an option the incubator would be far superior to garages and temporarily vacated conference rooms.

“The Bakar BioEnginuity Hub holds enormous promise as a space for mobilizing our vibrant changemaking students and faculty, our powerful research enterprise, and a community of innovators who will maximize societal benefit over profit,” said UC Chancellor Carol T. Christ in a Berkeley news release.

If this all sounds like a good match for your company (or maybe your roommate’s, currently operating out of the spare bedroom) head over here to apply.

Boston-based Apptopia, a company providing competitive intelligence in the mobile app ecosystem, has closed on $20 million in Series C funding aimed at fueling its expansion beyond the world of mobile apps. The new financing was led by ABS Capital Partners, and follows three consecutive years of 50% year-over-year growth for Apptopia’s business, which has been profitable since the beginning of last year, the company says.

Existing investors, including Blossom Street Ventures, also participated in the round. ABS Capital’s Mike Avon, a co-founder of Millennial Media, and Paul Mariani, are joining Apptopia’s board with this round.

The funding follows what Apptopia says has been increased demand from brands to better understand the digital aspects of their businesses.

Today, Apptopia’s customers include hundreds of corporations and financial institutions, including Google, Visa, Coca-Cola, Target, Zoom, NBC, Unity Technologies, Microsoft, Adobe, Glu, Andreessen Horowitz and Facebook.

In the past, Apptopia’s customers were examining digital engagement and interactions from a macro level, but now they’re looking to dive deeper into specific details, requiring more data. For example, a brand may have previously wanted to know how well a competitor’s promotion fared in terms of new users or app sessions. But now they want to know the answers to specific questions —  like how many unique users participated, whether those users were existing customers, whether they returned after the promotion ended, and so on.

The majority of Apptopia’s business is now focused on delivering these sorts of answers to enterprise customers who subscribe to Apptopia’s data — and possibly, to the data from its competitors like Sensor Tower and App Annie, with the goal of blending datasets together for a more accurate understanding of the competitive landscape.

Apptopia’s own data, historically, was not always seen as being the most accurate, admits Apptopia CEO Jonathan Kay. But it has improved over the years.

Kay, previously Apptopia COO, is now taking over the top role from co-founder Eliran Sapir, who’s transitioning to chairman of the board as the company enters its next phase of growth.

Apptopia’s rivals like Sensor Tower and App Annie use mobile panels to gather app data, among other methods, Kay explains. These panels involve consumer-facing apps like VPN clients and ad blockers, which users would download not necessarily understanding that they were agreeing to having their app usage data collected. This led to some controversy as the app data industry’s open secret was exposed to consumers by the media, and the companies tweaked their disclosures, as a result.

But the practice continues and has not impacted the companies’ growth. Sensor Tower, for example, raised $45 million last year, as demand for app data continued to grow. And all involved businesses are expanding with new products and services for their data-hungry customer bases.

Apptopia, meanwhile, decided not to grow its business on the back of mobile panels. (Though in its earlier days it did test and then scrap such a plan.)

It gains access to data from its app developer customers — and this data is already aggregated and anonymized from the developers’ Apple and Google Analytics accounts.

Initially, this method put Apptopia at a disadvantage. Rivals had more accurate data from about 2016 through 2018 because of their use of mobile panels, Kay says. But Apptopia made a strategic decision to not take this sort of risk — that is, build a business that Apple or Google could shut off at any time.

“Instead, what we did is we spent years investing into data science and algorithms,” notes Kay. “We figured out how to extract an equal or greater signal from the same data set that [competitors] had access to.”

Using what Kay describes as “huge, huge amounts of historical data,” Apptopia over time learned what sort of signals went into an app’s app store ranking. A lot of people still think an app’s rank is largely determined by downloads, but there are now a variety of signals that inform rank, Kay points out.

“Really, a rank is just an accumulation of analytical data points that Apple and Google give points for,” he explains. This includes things like number of sessions, how many users, how much time is spent in an app, and more. “Because we didn’t have these panels, we had to spend years figuring out how to do reverse engineering better than our competitors. And, eventually, we figured out how to get the same signal that they could get from the panel from rank. That’s what allowed us to have such a fast-growing, successful business over the past several years.”

As Apptopia was already profitable, it didn’t need to fundraise. But the company wanted to accelerate its expansion into new areas, including its planned expansion outside of mobile apps.

Today, consumers use “apps” on their computers, on their smartwatches and on their TV, in addition to their phones and tablets. And businesses no longer want to know just what’s happening on mobile — they want the full picture of “app” usage.

“We figured out a way to do that that doesn’t rely on any of what our competitors have done in the past,” says Kay. “So, we will not be using any apps to spy on people,” he states.

However, the company was not prepared to offer further details around its future product plans at this time. But Kay said Apptopia would not rule out partnerships or being acquisitive to accomplish its goals going forward.

Apptopia also sees a broader future in making its app data more accessible. Last year, for instance, it partnered with Bloomberg to bring mobile data to investors via the Bloomberg App Portal on the Bloomberg Terminal. And it now works with Amazon’s AWS Data Exchange and Snowflake to make access to app data available in other channels, as well. Future partnerships of a similar nature could come into play as another means of differentiating Apptopia’s data from its rivals.

The company declined to offer its current revenue run rate or valuation, but notes that it tripled its valuation from its last fundraise at the end of 2019.

In addition to product expansions, the company plans to leverage the funds to grow its team of 55 by another 25 in 2021, including in engineering and analysts. And it will grow its management team, adding a CFO, CPO, and CMO this year.

To date, Apptopia has raised $30 million in outside capital.

Imagine if you could settle/rekindle domestic arguments by asking your smart speaker when the room last got cleaned or whether the bins already got taken out?

Or — for an altogether healthier use-case — what if you could ask your speaker to keep count of reps as you do squats and bench presses? Or switch into full-on ‘personal trainer’ mode — barking orders to peddle faster as you spin cycles on a dusty old exercise bike (who needs a Peloton!).

And what if the speaker was smart enough to just know you’re eating dinner and took care of slipping on a little mood music?

Now imagine if all those activity tracking smarts were on tap without any connected cameras being plugged inside your home.

Another bit of fascinating research from researchers at Carnegie Mellon University’s Future Interfaces Group opens up these sorts of possibilities — demonstrating a novel approach to activity tracking that does not rely on cameras as the sensing tool. 

Installing connected cameras inside your home is of course a horrible privacy risk. Which is why the CMU researchers set about investigating the potential of using millimeter wave (mmWave) doppler radar as a medium for detecting different types of human activity.

The challenge they needed to overcome is that while mmWave offers a “signal richness approaching that of microphones and cameras”, as they put it, data to train AI models to recognize different human activities as RF noise is not plentiful.

Not to be deterred, they set about sythensizing doppler data to feed a human activity tracking model — devising a software pipeline for training privacy-preserving activity tracking AI models. 

The results can be seen in this video — where the model is shown correctly identifying a number of different activities, including cycling, clapping, waving and squats. Purely from its ability to interpret the mmWave signal the movements generate — and purely having been trained on public video data. 

“We show how this cross-domain translation can be successful through a series of experimental results,” they write. “Overall, we believe our approach is an important stepping stone towards significantly reducing the burden of training such as human sensing systems, and could help bootstrap uses in human-computer interaction.”

Researcher Chris Harrison confirms the mmWave doppler radar-based sensing doesn’t work for “very subtle stuff” (like spotting different facial expressions). But he says it’s sensitive enough to detect less vigorous activity — like eating or reading a book.

The motion detection ability of doppler radar is also limited by a need for line-of-sight between the subject and the sensing hardware. (Aka: “It can’t reach around corners yet.” Which, for those concerned about future robots’ powers of human detection, will surely sound slightly reassuring.)

Detection does require special sensing hardware, of course. But things are already moving on that front: Google has been dipping its toe in already, via project Soli — adding a radar sensor to the Pixel 4, for example.

Google’s Nest Hub also integrates the same radar sense to track sleep quality.

“One of the reasons we haven’t seen more adoption of radar sensors in phones is a lack of compelling use cases (sort of a chicken and egg problem),” Harris tells TechCrunch. “Our research into radar-based activity detection helps to open more applications (e.g., smarter Siris, who know when you are eating, or making dinner, or cleaning, or working out, etc.).”

Asked whether he sees greater potential in mobile or fixed applications, Harris reckons there are interesting use-cases for both.

“I see use cases in both mobile and non mobile,” he says. “Returning to the Nest Hub… the sensor is already in the room, so why not use that to bootstrap more advanced functionality in a Google smart speaker (like rep counting your exercises).

“There are a bunch of radar sensors already used in building to detect occupancy (but now they can detect the last time the room was cleaned, for example).”

“Overall, the cost of these sensors is going to drop to a few dollars very soon (some on eBay are already around $1), so you can include them in everything,” he adds. “And as Google is showing with a product that goes in your bedroom, the threat of a ‘surveillance society’ is much less worry-some than with camera sensors.”

Startups like VergeSense are already using sensor hardware and computer vision technology to power real-time analytics of indoor space and activity for the b2b market (such as measuring office occupancy).

But even with local processing of low-resolution image data, there could still be a perception of privacy risk around the use of vision sensors — certainly in consumer environments. Radar offers an alternative to such visual surveillance that could be a better fit for privacy-risking consumer connected devices like ‘smart mirrors‘.

“If it is processed locally, would you put a camera in your bedroom? Bathroom? Maybe I’m prudish but I wouldn’t personally,” says Harris.

He also points to earlier research which he says underlines the value of incorporating more types of sensing hardware: “The more sensors, the longer tail of interesting applications you can support. Cameras can’t capture everything, nor do they work in the dark.”

“Cameras are pretty cheap these days, so hard to compete there, even if radar is a bit cheaper. I do believe the strongest advantage is privacy preservation,” he adds.

Of course having any sensing hardware — visual or otherwise — raises potential privacy issues.

A sensor that tells you when a child’s bedroom is occupied may be good or bad depending on who has access to the data, for example. And all sorts of human activity can generate sensitive information, depending on what’s going on. (I mean, do you really want your smart speaker to know when you’re having sex?)

So while radar-based tracking may be less invasive than some other types of sensors it doesn’t mean there are no potential privacy concerns at all.

As ever, it depends on where and how the sensing hardware is being used. Albeit, it’s hard to argue that the data radar generates is likely to be less sensitive than equivalent visual data.

“Any sensor should naturally raise the question of privacy — it is a spectrum rather than a yes/no question,” agrees Harris.  “Radar sensors happen to be usually rich in detail, but highly anonymizing, unlike cameras. If your doppler radar data leaked online, it’d be hard to be embarrassed about it. No one would recognize you. If cameras from inside your house leaked online, well… ”

What about the compute costs of synthesizing the training data, given the lack of immediately available doppler signal data?

“It isn’t turnkey, but there are many large video corpuses to pull from (including things like Youtube-8M),” he says. “It is orders of magnitude faster to download video data and create synthetic radar data than having to recruit people to come into your lab to capture motion data.

“One is inherently 1 hour spent for 1 hour of quality data. Whereas you can download hundreds of hours of footage pretty easily from many excellently curated video databases these days. For every hour of video, it takes us about 2 hours to process, but that is just on one desktop machine we have here in the lab. The key is that you can parallelize this, using Amazon AWS or equivalent, and process 100 videos at once, so the throughput can be extremely high.”

And while RF signal does reflect, and do so to different degrees off of different surfaces (aka “multi-path interference”), Harris says the signal reflected by the user “is by far the dominant signal”. Which means they didn’t need to model other reflections in order to get their demo model working. (Though he notes that could be done to further hone capabilities “by extracting big surfaces like walls/ceiling/floor/furniture with computer vision and adding that into the synthesis stage”.)

“The [doppler] signal is actually very high level and abstract, and so it’s not particularly hard to process in real time (much less ‘pixels’ than a camera).” he adds. “Embedded processors in cars use radar data for things like collision breaking and blind spot monitoring, and those are low end CPUs (no deep learning or anything).”

The research is being presented at the ACM CHI conference, alongside another Group project — called Pose-on-the-Go — which uses smartphone sensors to approximate the user’s full-body pose without the need for wearable sensors.

CMU researchers from the Group have also previously demonstrated a method for indoor ‘smart home’ sensing on the cheap (also without the need for cameras), as well as — last year — showing how smartphone cameras could be used to give an on-device AI assistant more contextual savvy. In recent years they’ve also investigated using laser vibrometry and electromagnetic noise to give smart devices better environmental awareness and contextual functionality.

Other interesting research out of the Group includes using conductive spray paint to turn anything into a touchscreen. And various methods to extend the interactive potential of wearables — such as by using lasers to project virtual buttons onto the arm of a device user or incorporating another wearable (a ring) into the mix.

The future of human computer interaction looks certain to be a lot more contextually savvy — even if current-gen ‘smart’ devices can still stumble on the basics and seem more than a little dumb.

 

Munich-based parcelLab, which offers a final-mile fulfillment service for online retailers, has closed a $112 million (GB£80 million) Series C funding round led by the US VC/PE firm Insight Partners.

Germany’s Endeit Capital participated as a co-investor, alongside existing investors Capnamic Ventures and coparion. parcelLab last raised an undisclosed Series B in October 2019. The new funding will feed into parcelLab’s global expansion plans and new product development.

Founded in 2015 by Tobias Buxhoidt (CEO), Julian Krenge (CTO), and Anton Eder (COO), the startup has managed to bag such customers as Lidl, to which it provides automated personalized shipping messages. This means that as much as 85% of Lidl customers return to its website.

It also works with IKEA and Farfetch to increase basket sizes and email open rates of – it claims – over 90%, 25% reductions in WISMO (where is my order), and increases of customer reviews.   

In a statement Tobias Buxhoidt, CEO and Founder of parcelLab, said: “As e-commerce becomes increasingly competitive, providing unique and branded experiences will drive growth. Identifying opportunities to further connect with people and build a better, stronger relationship is a key differentiator.”   
 
Matt Gatto, Managing Director at Insight Partners, said: “We pride ourselves in identifying and investing in software ScaleUp companies that are driving transformative change in their industries. In parcelLab, we see true potential to transform how brands and people connect.”

Endeit only recently raised a €250 million fund to invest in B-stage European startups, so this is its most recent deployment of capital.

Philipp Schroeder Partner at Endeit commented: “ParcelLab’s team is the perfect example of internet entrepreneurs that we want to support – entrepreneurs who can drive the change to make Europe more competitive and who have the ambition to become global market leaders.” 

ParcelLab’s main competitor is US-based Narvar which has raised $64M, with its last round being a Series C funding.

On April 16, Uganda-based two-wheel ride-hailing platform SafeBoda announced that it had completed 1 million rides in Ibadan, a southwestern city in Nigeria. This might not seem spectacular from a global perspective because it took the startup a year and two months to achieve but it’s a noteworthy feat in African markets.

Ibadan is one of the cities where SafeBoda operates. The company, which first launched in Uganda, is disrupting the offline market of local motorcycles referred to as boda-bodas in Uganda and okadas in Nigeria.

In 2017, SafeBoda officially started operations in Kampala and almost immediately began to deal with the threat posed by new entrants at the time: uberBODA and Bolt boda.

Uber and Bolt are two of the most well-known ride-hailing companies in the markets in which they operate. Uganda was the first African country the pair decided to test out their two-wheel ride-hailing ambitions and it was the second market globally after Thailand for Uber. So given the clout and money these companies hold, most people anticipated they would give SafeBoda a run for its money. But that didn’t happen.

According to Alastair Sussock, co-CEO of SafeBoda, who founded the company with Ricky Rapa Thomson and Maxime Dieudonne, SafeBoda was clocking about 1,000 rides daily at the time. He argued that even though the company’s volumes were one of the best, there was a misrepresentation in the media that SafeBoda wasn’t in the league as other platforms.

“Everyone thought Uber and Bolt would enter Africa to revolutionize the informal boda market,” Sussock told TechCrunch. “There was mention of other players, some of which have folded now, but no one mentioned SafeBoda although we were actually doing quite good stuff. And that energized us to prove the perception wrong, which was that SafeBoda didn’t really exist”.

Strategy, hard work and a large Series B investment followed the next couple of years, which has established SafeBoda as a market leader in Uganda. Sussock said the company now completes about 40,000 rides a day. Uber and Bolt barely complete 10,000 rides in the country.

So what has been pivotal to this growth? Before founding SafeBoda, Rapa Thomson was also a boda rider. As the company’s director of operations, he’s pivotal in making sure the company adopts localized methods with its riders. And despite its exciting features, pieces of equipment and safety measures employed, what stands out is how SafeBoda adapts to the boda boda community. This has been responsible for the 80% year-on-year retention the company currently enjoys, Sussock said.

“We tend to localize our product and take a local approach where we hire local guys to be part of the team. They help to have boots on the ground and of course, what you see with Nigeria, is not as much a dissimilar story,” the co-CEO added.

When starting in Nigeria, most two-wheel ride-hailing startups begin from Lagos, the nation’s hotbed of commerce and transport. In recent times, the city has had entrants like Opera’s OPay, Gokada and MAX.ng. These startups, like SafeBoda, are heavily backed by U.S., Chinese and Japanese investors. They have been at loggerheads with each other to capture on-demand mobility market share in Africa’s most populous country.

SafeBoda first hinted at a possible expansion into Nigeria in 2019. All the aforementioned ride-hailing companies were already in operation and it appeared as if SafeBoda was a very late entrant. But according to Babajide Duroshola, the country head for SafeBoda in Nigeria, the team knew it was going to thrive in spite of the timing and what competition looked like. “For us, it was a no-brainer decision to come into Nigeria and do the same thing that we did at Kampala, which is to grow quickly and make SafeBoda a household name,” he said to TechCrunch. 

When time came to reveal which city it was going to start with, it was Ibadan, not Lagos. SafeBoda caught everyone unawares with the decision and subsequently faced heavy backlash. This was in December 2019 but fast-forward to February 2020; it proved to be a masterstroke because in one fell swoop, the Lagos State government rendered bike-hailing operations obsolete with new regulations. For the next couple of months, SafeBoda was the only reliable source of two-wheel ride-hail service in the country. While the regulations forced others to pivot into asset financing for bikes and logistics services, SafeBoda was waxing strong with its ride-hailing operations in Ibadan.

In its first five months, SafeBoda had completed more than 250,000 rides and onboarded thousands of drivers. Once again, adopting a local strategy and community building proved vital to the seemingly modest but explosive growth it experienced in a market no company had really tested.

“One of the things that really separated us from all the other guys in the market was a localization play. The fact that we could connect with and employ these people who were okada drivers right off the streets to become part of our operations team was very key,” Duroshola said.

The country manager added that SafeBoda’s progress showed other two-wheel operators that a market outside Lagos existed. “Lagos is the commercial capital. There’s a lot of money in the city and income per household is high. But then, it is not a true representation of Nigeria. We saw that if you really want to scale across the country, Ibadan was actually a very good place to start because it had all the kinds of people you’d typically find in Nigeria.”

The ease of doing business for a ride-hailing platform in Ibadan is also easier than in Lagos. The latter is known for endorsing NURTW, a transport group known to legally extort riders daily or weekly in the city. Such activities are prohibited in Ibadan giving SafeBoda a smooth path to achieving scale and allowing its drivers to work effectively.

A year in the city has rewarded the company with over 2,500 drivers and 40,000 customers. Together, they performed more than 750,000 trips in SafeBoda’s first year, which has since surpassed more than 1 million trips.

SafeBoda’s progress in Uganda and Nigeria makes it one of the most active players in Sub-Saharan Africa. The company has completed more than 35 million rides across both countries, with over 25,000 registered riders. It also claims to hold more than 80% market share in the two countries.

Despite this success, SafeBoda struggled in its third market, Kenya — a market it expanded to and left before Nigeria. The company had onboarded over 1,500 riders in less than a year, but it wasn’t growing at the pace it wanted. The pandemic made SafeBoda’s struggles obvious and per this report, riders’ dissatisfaction with pricing caused an upheaval that sent the company out of the Kenyan market.

In addition to rider troubles, Sussock noted that Kenya’s motorcycle taxi market wasn’t as highly dense as Uganda and Nigeria which, according to him, contributed to the exit.

“We were the market leader in Kenya, and we were doing like the most rides in Kenya. But it was still quite small in terms of volume compared to Uganda. And we knew what the potential would be in Nigeria, which we hadn’t done at the time. So it was just quite clear that Kenya, while very developed for tech, and developed per capita, was just really quite hard to scale in terms of motorcycle taxi transportation,” he said.

SafeBoda isn’t ruling out a return to the East African market. But with the East African market out of the way for now, it has the resources to focus ride-hailing efforts on Uganda and Nigeria. The ultimate goal, however, is to scale its super app play.

In Uganda, it is already in motion. SafeBoda offers on-demand food, grocery, pharmacy, essentials and beverages delivery services, of which more than 500,000 orders have been completed. This model is inspired by the Go-Pay model at GoJek, where two-wheel ride-hailing was an entry point to high-frequency wallet spend behavior.

The Asian multi-service company is one of the investors in SafeBoda via its GoVentures arm. Other backers include Transsion Holdings, Beenext, and serial entrepreneur Justin Kan.

SafeBoda has no real competition in the bike-hailing wars in Uganda and Nigeria as it stands. The company’s challenge remains the large offline market, where more than 1.5 million rides are completed daily in Uganda alone. The plan for SafeBoda is to convert more of this base to its existing online market share. Additionally, it wants to expand into P2P, merchant and bill payments and grow its on-demand business in Uganda. Its plan in Nigeria? Maintaining its core transport business before venturing into payments and deliveries.

As schools move more widely into reopening their doors for in-person learning, many educational institutions have also learned a critical lesson in the last year. Having better tools to teach remotely are critical for situations when the physical experience has to be shut down, but even when things are “back to normal”, better tech can still enhance what educators and students can do, and to whom teaching can be delivered. Now, a startup betting on virtual learning in higher education — and investing in the innovation to deliver that — is announcing a round of funding as it continues to expand its business.

Engageli, which has built an online teaching platform from the ground up — providing not just its own built-in-house video technology to deliver lectures and enable conversations, but tools to enable students to “sit” in study groups to work together; and features to share and annotate lecture notes, take quizzes and more — has picked up $33 million in funding.

CEO Dan Avida — who co-founded the company with his wife Daphne Koller (the Coursera co-founder) and Serge Plotkin — said the startup will be using to continue building more tools and scaling its platform and opening it up to more schools, specifically the bracket of higher learning colleges and universities that it targets as customers, as these institutions continue to embrace the promise of better video tools both for delivering live lessons, and also to develop more on-demand and other features around Engageli’s video platform.

“At first the priority was on the best synchronous experience,” Avida said in an interview of the priorities of universities when it came to remote learning. “Now everyone is much more focused on multi-modality.”

The funding, a Series A, is being co-led by Maveron and another (unnamed) investor and also includes participation from Corner Ventures, Good Friends, Educapital, and what Engageli describes as several “prominent individual technology executives.”

Notably, the funding is coming only seven months after the startup first emerged from stealth in October 2020, and investors from the $14.5 million seed round that it announced at the same time are also participating. The startup has now raised over $47 million and is not disclosing its valuation.

While there are now dozens, maybe even hundreds, of tools to help students learn things without being inside a traditional classroom, Engageli has taken a slightly different approach from the pack by building its video-based platform from the ground up with educational aims in mind.

This is already a step change, when you think about it, from the likes of Teams from Microsoft, Google Classroom, or Zoom. These are three of the most commonly used video platforms in educational settings, but they are all based on technology that was, essentially, originally built with more enterprise and generic purposes in mind.

From this, Engageli has worked on expanding the platform with tools that enhance not just the video experience, but enhance it in ways that make sense for educators and learners.

Up to now, these have focused on both the kinds of conversations that students can have with each other and the teacher, and ways for the teacher to keep their students engaged, by way of quizzes, notes that they can download and annotate and Q&A channels. For now, Engageli is focused on building its own technology, but over time you can see how the platform might open up to link up with bigger learning management systems and the other tools that institutions might already be using regularly.

Avida said that Engageli is not yet disclosing any metrics on engagement time, customer or user numbers or any other figures. For now, he said the startup is picking up university customers across the U.S., in the UK and Israel (where the founders hail from and all originally cut their tech teeth in the country’s military units), where classes are already handling up to “hundreds” of concurrent students.

He also added that even as more schools return to in-person learning, he is expecting a boost of new users in the fall quarter because the genie, so to speak, is out of the bottle with remote learning and the fact that it can continue to be effective.

“Even before the pandemic there were tens of millions of students online, half of all students were taking some form of online course, and we expect this to go much further, not unlike online grocery or telemedicine,” he said. “One professor described it to me like this: the trough of disillusionment” — a reference to the Gartner Magic Quadrant visualization — “is very shallow here. We ain’t going back.”

This is also a sentiment that educators also seem to be picking up.

“It’s hard to go back once you raise the bar on engagement. With Engageli, I felt the experience was the most like a real classroom. Students are sitting at tables, I can quickly see what they are doing, they can ask others at their table questions, they are chatting and interacting,” said Dr. Theodora Christou, a professor at Queen Mary University of London, in a statement. “I finally have an easy way to lead meaningful group work and case studies online. I would choose Engageli over any other existing tool that my university offers.”

The company’s funding and growth come at a time when we’re indeed seeing a wider wholesale adoption and development of more tools to accommodate digital modes of learning, in many cases also to complement what is happening offline, and also in younger age groups, too.

Just in the last week, Kahoot acquired Clever in the U.S. to bring on a popular platform used by many K-12 schools to manage their online learning interctions, and yesterday StuDocu raised funding for a platform that crowdsources, rates and shares university class notes, a platform that has now passed 15 million students and is growing very fast. All of these spell higher expectations for better technology in the future, something Engageli will also be hoping to engage.

“Dan Avida and his team at Engageli, that includes professors, talented technologists and accomplished ed-tech executives, are uniquely suited to building a digital education solution that actually feels like a classroom and functions even better than some in-person courses,” said Jason Stoffer, Partner at Maveron, in a statement. “Pandemic or not, every school needs Engageli to drive better outcomes for students, whether they’re taking remote classes full time or opt to tune in digitally when they need the flexibility. We’re passionate about leveling the playing field in higher education, and Engageli’s unique platform will help institutions reach and support the needs of every type of student.”

 

Google Pay users in the U.S. can now send money to GPay users in India and Singapore, Google said on Tuesday, making its first push into the remittance market.

The company has partnered with Western Union and Wise, both of which have integrated their services into Google Pay. This is the first time either of the cross-border payments firms have inked such a deal.

Josh Woodward, Director of Product Management at Google, told TechCrunch in an interview that the company is kickstarting its cross-border payments feature with India and Singapore and intends to expand this worldwide by the end of the year.

“As we do with a number of Google products, we will test, learn, and iterate and then start scaling,” he said.

As part of the partnership, Western Union will power cross-border payments on Google Pay in over 200 countries, while Wise will extend the support in over 80 countries.

When Google Pay users in the U.S. attempt to send money to someone in India or Singapore, they will be informed about the exact amount that the recipient will receive. From within the Google Pay app, users also get to choose which payments provider — Wise or Western Union — they wish to use and how long it would take for the recipient to receive the money.

The remittance feature currently allows only Google Pay’s US users to send money to those in India and Singapore — and not the other way around. Woodward said the company picked India and Singapore in part because of how crucial they are in the remittance world.

India was the largest receiving country for remittances in 2019, receiving more than $80 billion in the year, according to the World Bank. The U.S., meanwhile, is the largest sender. Eventually, Google intends to enable a fully cross-border remittance worldwide.

Also worth noting: The cross-border payments is only available for person-to-person payments. (Businesses on GPay in the U.S. can’t send money to individuals or businesses in India, for instance.)

The partnership with Google will help Wise and Western Union to expand their presence in several markets and more aggressively compete with rivals such as PayPal, which has a wider reach. Wise and Western Union will shoulder the liability and risk.

Nearly 250 million people across the world send over $500 billion in cross-border remittances annually, a report by Citi said last month. But the space is ripe for disruption. “The fees are extremely high. It is embarrassing that we have not solved this issue so far,” Citi analysts wrote. Global average cost for sending money is around 6.5%.

Western Union said in a statement that receivers will pay no charges and will get the exact value in their local currency as chosen by the user in the U.S. Wise said it will charge the actual foreign exchange rate and additional transfer fees, which will wary from country to country. (“The easiest way to find out how much it’ll cost is to find a friend on Google Pay, select Wise as a partner, tap Pay, and enter the amount you’d like to transfer,” it said.)

In either case, Google will not levy any fee to customers. Also, until June 16, Western Union will offer unlimited free transfers when sending money with Google Pay, and Wise will make the first transfer free for new customers on transfers up to $500.

Tuesday’s announcement comes months after Google redesigned the GPay app in the U.S., making it look a lot like GPay app in India and Singapore.

Lisbon-based food delivery startup Kitch hopes to hands back control to restaurants dogged by the mess of food delivery apps today, by aggregating the apps onto one tablet and platform. Restaurants then get one place to manage all their delivery orders, track couriers, and update their menus across all the delivery apps. It’s now raised a €3.25 ($4M) Seed round led by Atlantic Food Labs, with the participation from Market One Capital and the company’s initial investors, Seedcamp and Lisbon-based Mustard Seed MAZE.

Launched in March 2020 Kitch developed its own proprietary technology to support independent restaurants
Rui Bento, co-founder and CEO at Kitch said: “We are committed to making available and to keep developing the tools that enable restaurants to retain their independence and to regain control of their digital businesses.”

Patrick Huber, Partner at Atlantic Food Labs said: “Kitch has shown remarkable traction within a very short time, in a market that continues to grow rapidly.”

With the Kitch app, restaurants create an online store, enabling them to sell their dishes on delivery and takeaway and can own a relationship with their customers. Kitch takes care of payments, deliveries, and customer support and interfaces with apps such as Uber Eats, Glovo, and Deliveroo.

Say what you will, Nothing has been doing a fine job milking its upcoming launch for all it’s worth. The company has spent the last several month’s teasing the arrival of its first product. The launch will find the company entering the already extremely crowded earbuds category in June, with the arrival of the simply named Ear 1.

Founder Carl Pei teased the forthcoming product in a blog post today, while adding that the company was still a ways off from fully achieving its mission statement of hardware products that simply disappear.

“For those hoping for a disappearing act overnight, Ear 1 falls short,” Pei writes. “The greatest visions are not realized with the flip of a switch, but instead through countless small successes. Ear 1 is just the start. Design is still top secret but what we can tell you is that Ear 1 combines notes of transparency, iconic form, and refined  functionality. It is the starting point that will define the artistry, confidence and craftsmanship that will carry our products and services for years to come.”

Pre-launch hype around the company and product is certainly understandable. Beyond teasing the launch piece by piece, Pei has earned goodwill as the co-founder of OnePlus. The company grew at an impressive rate, courtesy of quality smartphones at an affordable price point, all while maintaining a direct line to its fanbase.

The forthcoming product maintains OnePlus’ simple naming scheme. “Can you guess what the sequel will be called?” the executive asks rhetorically. “Good. Us too.”

OnePlus has also entered the earbuds game, including, most recently, the launch of the fully wireless OnePlus Buds.

Sweden’s Exeger, which for over a decade has been developing flexible solar cell technology (called Powerfoyle) that it touts as efficient enough to power gadgets solely with light, has taken in another tranche of funding to expand its manufacturing capabilities by opening a second factory in the country.

The $38 million raise is comprised of $20M in debt financing from Swedbank and Swedish Export Credit Corporation (SEK), with a loan amounting to $12M from Swedbank (partly underwritten by the Swedish Export Credit Agency (EKN) under the guarantee of investment credits for companies with innovations) and SEK issuing a loan amounting to $8M (partly underwritten by the pan-EU European Investment Fund (EIF)); along with $18M through a directed share issue to Ilija Batljan Invest AB.

The share issue of 937,500 shares has a transaction share price of $19.2 — which corresponds to a pre-money valuation of $860M for the solar cell maker.

Back in 2019 SoftBank also put $20M into Exeger, in two investments of $10M — entering a strategic partnership to accelerate the global rollout of its tech and further extending its various investments in solar energy.

The Swedish company has also previously received a loan from the Swedish Energy Agency, in 2014, to develop its solar cell tech. But this latest debt financing round is its first on commercial terms (albeit partly underwritten by EKN and EIF).

Exeger says its solar cell tech is the only one that can be printed in free-form and different colors, meaning it can “seamlessly enhance any product with endless power”, as its PR puts it.

So far two devices have integrated the Powerfoyle tech: A bike helmet with an integrated safety taillight (by POC), and a pair of wireless headphones (by Urbanista). Although neither has yet been commercially launched — but both are slated to go on sale next month.

Exeger says its planned second factory in Stockholm will allow it to increase its manufacturing capacity tenfold by 2023, helping it target a broader array of markets sooner and accelerating its goal of mass adoption of its tech.

Its main target markets for the novel solar cell technology currently include consumer electronics, smart home, smart workplace, and IoT.

More device partnerships are slated as coming this year.

“We don’t label our rounds but take a more pragmatic view on fundraising,” said Giovanni Fili, founder and CEO. “Developing a new technology, a new energy source, as well as laying the foundation for a new industry takes time. Thus, a company like ours requires long-term strategic investors that all buy into the vision as well as the overall strategy. We have spent a lot of time and energy on this, and it has paid off. It has given the company the resources required, both time and money, to bring an invention to a commercial launch, which is where we are today.”

Fili added that it’s chosen to raise debt financing now “because we can”.

“The same answer as when asked why we build a new factory in Stockholm, Sweden, rather than abroad. We have always said that once commercial, we will start leveraging the balance sheet when securing funds for the next factory. Thanks to our long-standing relationship with Swedbank and SEK, as well as the great support of the Swedish government through EKN underwriting part of the loans, we were able to move this forward,” he said.

Discussing the forthcoming two debut gizmos, the POC Omne Eternal helmet and the Urbanista Los Angeles headphones — which will both go sale in June — Fili says interest in the self-powered products has “surpassed all our expectations”.

“Any product which integrates Powerfoyle is able to charge under all forms of light, whether from indoor lamps or natural outdoor light. The stronger the light, the faster it charges. The POC helmet, for example, doesn’t have a USB port to power the safety light because the ambient light will keep it charging, cycling or not,” he tells TechCrunch.

“The Urbanista Los Angeles wireless headphones have already garnered tremendous interest online. Users can spend one hour outdoors with the headphones and gain three hours of battery time. This means most users will never need to worry about charging. As long as you have our product in light, any light, it will constantly charge. That’s one of the key aspects of our technology, we have designed and engineered the solar cell to work wherever people need it to work.”

“This is the year of our commercial breakthrough,” he added in a statement. “The phenomenal response from the product releases with POC and Urbanista are clear indicators this is the perfect time to introduce self-powered products to
the world. We need mass scale production to realize our vision which is to touch the lives of a billion people by 2030, and that’s why the factory is being built now.”