Author: azeeadmin

Lynk announced today that its “knowledge-as-a-service” platform will be integrated into UBS’ investment process. The collaboration means the banking giant’s research analysts and institutional clients, including hedge funds, private equity firms and sovereign wealth funds, will have access to Lynk’s database of 840,000 experts around the world.

Founded in 2015, Lynk has raised a total of $30 million in funding, including a $24 million round announced in January that was led by Brewer Lane Ventures and MassMutual Ventures, with participation from the Alibaba Entrepreneurs Fund. The startup has offices in New York, Hong Kong, Singapore, Mumbai, Shanghai and Toronto, and serves about 200 enterprise clients, including Fortune 500 corporations, investment firms and government agencies.

UBS’s global research analysts now have access to Lynk’s database of experts, while UBS Global Markets will introduce the startup’s solutions to its institutional clients.

Lynk’s technology uses machine learning algorithms to match clients with experts in its database. Lynk’s experts cover a wide range of industries and sectors and include C-suite executives, independent consultants, lawyers, engineers, financial analysts and scientists. The platform also has collaboration tools, so teams can automatically transcribe question-and-answer sessions, search transcripts and share notes.

“Our platform capabilities, the scope and depth of our network and our customer service that’s paired with technology is really quite synergistic with how UBS is looking at their business,” Lynk co-founder and chief executive officer Peggy Choi told TechCrunch. “They have demonstrated a very strong innovation track record in the equity research space, so this is a great extension to their suite of offerings.”

During the pandemic, Lynk’s clients in the investment sector have used it to perform research and due diligence on potential investments remotely, which Choi expects to continue even after travel picks up again.

“Relying on on-the-ground experts, working with them to verify assumptions and develop convictions before making an investment is a must,” said Choi. “We’re really seeing a structural change and that is also what UBS is hearing from its customers.”

In press statement, UBS Global Head of Research Dan Dowd said, “We are proud of our innovation track record and are highly focused on helping investors get to the crux of key investment debates as rapidly as possible. Showcasing Lynk’s technology and expertise has the potential to substantially accelerate the investment processes of our clients.”

About 180 million people globally suffer from infertility. In the United States, one in eight families have trouble conceiving. The statistics are only getting worse, as male infertility and miscarriages continue to increase.

Alife Health, a San Francisco-based startup founded by Paxton Maeder-York, thinks it can help. The startup wants to use artificial intelligence to increase fertility outcomes. Specifically, it wants to optimize in vitro fertilization, a fertility treatment that requires a series of expensive and emotionally-taxing procedures with varied success rates.

Founded last year, the startup just raised a $9.5 million seed round, led by Lux Capital. Other investment firms include Amplo, IA Ventures and Springbank Collective as well as angel investors such as Anne Wojcicki, the founder and CEO of 23andMe, Fred Moll, the founder of Intuitive Surgical and Auris, and Amira Yahyaoui, the founder of Mos and Sequoia Scout.

“I personally believe that improving the quality of care through personalized treatments and reducing costs by increasing the success outcome rate can be incredibly impactful here, not just for the broader population but also specifically for minority groups,” Maeder-York said.

The founder began his career building surgical robots to fight lung cancer at Auris Health which was acquired by Johnson & Johnson in 2019. Now, he’s onto finding a way to help physicians and patients go through the process of IVF.

FYI, IVF

In vitro fertilization, or IVF, takes on average three to six cycles to get pregnant, and each cycle can cost between $10,000 to $20,000 in the United States. Every woman who goes through the process has to be injected with hormones weekly or biweekly – and even then, success is varied. And beyond steep costs and a long process, anyone who goes through the IVF process often has to endure the emotional toll.

Alife Health could alleviate some uncertainty around the complex process if it succeeds.

Currently, there are startups that focus on disrupting IVF from its cost to its accessibility. Maeder-York thinks that there is no single point solution that can fix the process, so he wants to optimize each part, step by step, from education and awareness, and clinical workflows to the actual embryo selection.

While Alife Health’s long-term goal is to use AI in all aspects of the IVF process, at this point, the technology is only used in one step for Alife Health: the embryo selection process.

Alife Health plans to begin its AI-powered IVF solution through embryo selection. During IVF, future parents might create multiple embryos. It’s then on the doctor to look at that embryo image through a microscope and figure out which is most likely to survive, taking into account patient information.

Alife Health is inserting machine learning based on a massive set of historical data it has aggregated, into the embryo selection equation. Maeder-York said that they plan to use data to understand what the “optimal order of transfer is” and then improve chances of a pregnancy, so people don’t have to go through IVF for the third or fourth time.

“It’s been trained on thousands and thousands of images, knowing that this image and this patient turned into a successful pregnancy, “he said. Once machine learning finds a pattern it can move forward with a recommendation and help future parents prioritize which embryos to transfer.

Pandemic baby

Alife Health is not alone. Two other startups,Embryonic and Mojo, claim they have the AI needed to spot a healthy embryo and improve IVF success.

Israel-based Embryonic is in the early stages of its business and has minimal efficacy proof at this point. Mojo uses microscopy hardware and AI software to focus on sperm counts and then better pick strong sperm for the IVF. Internally testing of Mojo Pro shows that the system is 97% accurate compared to manual sperm counting.

Alife Health is a hardware agnostic program so unlike Mojo, for example, a provider doesn’t need to use or buy a special microscope to use its product.

Deena Shakir, partner at Lux Capital, is joining Alife Health’s board as part of the translation. Shakir said she spent over a year meeting with the team and other IVF-focused startups to develop her thesis before eventually cutting a check. She pointed out a number of reasons that Alife Health stood out to her, primarily its focus on an end-to-end solution at the IVF process, but also its clinician-friendly approach.

“Other kludgey solutions require additional interfaces, hardware, [and] time,” she said. “Clinicians don’t have an appetite for that in their daily workflows. It needs to be intuitive.”

Along with being a software-only solution, Alife Health sees part of its competitive edge as its partnerships with clinics. It has spent years cultivating a network of IVF clinics – and their data on prior cases, treatments and outcomes – to get a representative set that could be used to help any person receiving IVF treatment, it says.

“Unfortunately, women have been consistently underrepresented in research and minority women, black women have been incredibly underrepresented in research,” Maeder-York said. “The fact that our data set is so well stratified and representative of these groups means that when we [see] a patient of one off these minority groups, we’re going to be in a really unique position to give them answers and personalized care.”

Alife Health declined to release information about the efficacy of its AI, and it is still yet to get regulatory approval. Fittingly, millions of dollars should help it get to this next, and crucial phase.

Bitso, a regulated crypto exchange in Latin America, announced today it has raised $250 million in a Series C round of funding that values the company at $2.2 billion.

Tiger Global and Coatue co-led the round, which also included participation from Paradigm, BOND & Valor Capital Group and existing backers QED, Pantera Capital and Kaszek.

The news caught our attention for several reasons. For one, it comes just four months after the Brazilian startup raised $62 million in a Series B round. Secondly, the company believes the funding makes it the most valuable crypto platform in Latin America. And lastly, it also makes the company one of the most highly valued fintechs in the region.

Last year was a good one for Bitso, which says it processed more than $1.2 billion in international payments — including remittances and payments between companies — during 2020 alone. Bitso says it also has surpassed 2 million users. These two milestones, the company argues, is evidence of the growing use of crypto as an everyday financial tool in the region.

Demand for crypto assets and crypto-enabled financial products have soared in popularity both for individuals and businesses in the region, according to Bitso, which aims to be “the safest, most transparent, and only regulatory compliant platform” in Latin America. The company also says it’s the only player in the region to offer crypto-insurance for its client’s funds.

“The growth of the crypto ecosystem this year has been remarkable. It took Bitso six years to get its first million clients. Now — less than 10 months later — we have reached the 2 million mark,” said Bitso co-founder and CEO Daniel Vogel. But the metrics he is most proud of are that Bitso has also more than doubled the assets on its platform in the last five months and that its transacting volume during the 2021 first quarter exceeded the transaction volume it did in all of 2020.

Bitso was founded in January 2014 and acquired its first customer in April of that year.

Bitso’s mission, put simply, is to build next-generation borderless financial services for consumers and businesses alike. “Cryptocurrencies are the future of finance and Bitso makes the future available today,” the company says.

“Bitso offers products and services for individuals and businesses to use crypto in their everyday life,” Vogel said. “In some parts of the world, crypto is associated with speculation. Bitso’s customers rely on the technology for everyday uses from receiving remittances to engaging in international commerce.”

Bitso says its “global-minded” product offerings fit the needs of local customers in Mexico, Argentina and now Brazil, where it just launched its retail operations. The company plans to use its new capital toward broadening its capabilities and product offering. It also plans to expand its operations in other Latin American countries in the coming months. In January, the Financial Superintendence of Colombia announced Bitso as one of the authorized companies in its Sandbox and crypto pilot program.

Bitso’s upcoming products include a crypto derivatives platform and interest bearing accounts for crypto.

“This is a pivotal moment for the future of finance in Latin America,” Vogel told TechCrunch. “We see a significant amount of traditional financial infrastructure in the region being replaced by crypto. We plan to use this funding to continue that trend by expanding our product offering for individuals and businesses.”

Naturally, Bitso’s investors are bullish on the company’s potential.

QED Investors co-founder and managing partner Nigel Morris admits that in the past he was “a crypto denier.”

“For the longest time, we didn’t see a way crypto fit. It wasn’t clear until recently that the use cases for crypto expanded much beyond speculative trading. There are now a whole series of conventional banking products that we can wrap around it,” Morris told TechCrunch.

Bitso’s mission, he said, is to “make crypto useful” and QED believes the company is succeeding at doing just that.

“Daniel and the entire Bitso team is passionate about taking the mystique out of crypto. Crypto is not going away; it’s going to be here for the future,” Morris said. “By sitting at the intersection of crypto and traditional financial institutions, Bitso has a promise to provide lower-cost, friction-free financial services to entire populations of individuals who otherwise would be excluded — a laudable and unique mission indeed.”

Bitso, he added, is learning from the crypto experience in the U.S. and around the world.

“Not making the same mistakes and leaning into the emerging regulatory landscape has been a competitive advantage to Bitso’s success in Mexico,” Morris said. “As Bitso grows throughout the regions, they certainly have a leg up and might even leapfrog crypto adoption in the U.S.”

“Crypto is rapidly gaining adoption in Latin America,” said Tiger Global Partner Scott Shleifer, in a written statement. “We are excited to partner with Bitso and believe they have the right team and platform to increase share in this growing market.”

Founded in 2014, Bitso has more than 300 employees across 25 different countries. That compares to 116 employees last year at this time. In particular, its growth in Brazil is increasing exponentially.

“We’ve gone from 1 to 26 Bitsonauts already based in Brazil, with many more working from abroad, and plan to 3X our number of hires in Brazil by the end of the year,” Vogel said, who acknowledged that the pandemic really impacted his company via the shift to remote work. “As we expand our reach into new territories, it has become a lot easier to meet staffing needs when the requirements are based on knowledge over geography.”

Bitso’s leadership is mostly based in Mexico, but the company also has offices in Buenos Aires, São Paolo and Gibraltar.

Halfway through my Monday afternoon workout last week, I got a message from a security researcher with a screenshot of my Peloton account data.

My Peloton profile is set to private and my friend’s list is deliberately zero, so nobody can view my profile, age, city, or workout history. But a bug allowed anyone to pull users’ private account data directly from Peloton’s servers, even with their profile set to private.

Peloton, the at-home fitness brand synonymous with its indoor stationary bike, has more than three million subscribers. Even President Biden is even said to own one. The exercise bike alone costs upwards of $1,800, but anyone can sign up for a monthly subscription to join a broad variety of classes.

As Biden was inaugurated (and his Peloton moved to the White House — assuming the Secret Service let him), Jan Masters, a security researcher at Pen Test Partners, found he could make unauthenticated requests to Peloton’s API for user account data without it checking to make sure the person was allowed to request it. (An API allows two things to talk to each other over the internet, like a Peloton bike and the company’s servers storing user data.)

But the exposed API let him — and anyone else on the internet — access a Peloton user’s age, gender, city, weight, workout statistics, and if it was the user’s birthday, details that are hidden when users’ profile pages are set to private.

Masters reported the leaky API to Peloton on January 20 with a 90-day deadline to fix the bug, the standard window time that security researchers give to companies to fix bugs before details are made public.

But that deadline came and went, the bug wasn’t fixed, and Masters hadn’t heard back from the company, aside from an initial email acknowledging receipt of the bug report. Instead, Peloton only restricted access to its API to its members. But that just meant anyone could sign up with a monthly membership and get access to the API again.

TechCrunch contacted Peloton after the deadline lapsed to ask why the vulnerability report had been ignored, and Peloton confirmed yesterday that it had fixed the vulnerability. (TechCrunch held this story until the bug was fixed in order to prevent misuse.)

Peloton spokesperson Amelise Lane provided the following statement:

It’s a priority for Peloton to keep our platform secure and we’re always looking to improve our approach and process for working with the external security community. Through our Coordinated Vulnerability Disclosure program, a security researcher informed us that he was able to access our API and see information that’s available on a Peloton profile. We took action, and addressed the issues based on his initial submissions, but we were slow to update the researcher about our remediation efforts. Going forward, we will do better to work collaboratively with the security research community and respond more promptly when vulnerabilities are reported. We want to thank Ken Munro for submitting his reports through our CVD program and for being open to working with us to resolve these issues.

Masters has since put up a blog post explaining the vulnerabilities in more detail.

Munro, who founded Pen Test Partners, told TechCrunch: “Peloton had a bit of a fail in responding to the vulnerability report, but after a nudge in the right direction, took appropriate action. A vulnerability disclosure program isn’t just a page on a website; it requires coordinated action across the organisation.”

But questions remain for Peloton. When asked repeatedly, the company declined to say why it had not responded to Masters’ vulnerability report. It’s also not known if anyone maliciously exploited the vulnerabilities, such as mass-scraping account data.

Facebook, LinkedIn, and Clubhouse have all fallen victim to scraping attacks that abuse access to APIs to pull in data about users on their platforms. But Peloton declined to confirm if it had logs to rule out any malicious exploitation of its leaky API.

Disqus, a commenting plugin that’s used by a number of news websites and which can share user data for ad targeting purposes, has got into hot water in Norway for tracking users without their consent.

The local data protection agency said today it has notified the U.S.-based company of an intent to fine it €2.5 million (~$3M) for failures to comply with requirements in Europe’s General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) on accountability, lawfulness and transparency.

Disqus’ parent, Zeta Global, has been contacted for comment.

Datatilsynet said it acted following a 2019 investigation in Norway’s national press — which found that default settings buried in the Disqus’ plug-in opted sites into sharing user data on millions of users in markets including the U.S.

And while in most of Europe the company was found to have applied an opt-in to gather consent from users to be tracked — likely in order to avoid trouble with the GDPR — it appears to have been unaware that the regulation applies in Norway.

Norway is not a member of the European Union but is in the European Economic Area — which adopted the GDPR in July 2018, slightly after it came into force elsewhere in the EU. (Norway transposed the regulation into national law also in July 2018.)

The Norwegian DPA writes that Disqus’ unlawful data-sharing has “predominantly been an issue in Norway” — and says that seven websites are affected: NRK.no/ytring, P3.no, tv.2.no/broom, khrono.no, adressa.no, rights.no and document.no.

“Disqus has argued that their practices could be based on the legitimate interest balancing test as a lawful basis, despite the company being unaware that the GDPR applied to data subjects in Norway,” the DPA’s director-general, Bjørn Erik Thon, goes on.

“Based on our investigation so far, we believe that Disqus could not rely on legitimate interest as a legal basis for tracking across websites, services or devices, profiling and disclosure of personal data for marketing purposes, and that this type of tracking would require consent.”

“Our preliminary conclusion is that Disqus has processed personal data unlawfully. However, our investigation also discovered serious issues regarding transparency and accountability,” Thon added.

The DPA said the infringements are serious and have affected “several hundred thousands of individuals”, adding that the affected personal data “are highly private and may relate to minors or reveal political opinions”.

“The tracking, profiling and disclosure of data was invasive and nontransparent,” it added.

The DPA has given Disqus until May 31 to comment on the findings ahead of issuing a fine decision.

Publishers reminded of their responsibility

Datatilsynet has also fired a warning shot at local publishers who were using the Disqus platform — pointing out that website owners “are also responsible under the GDPR for which third parties they allow on their websites”.

So, in other words, even if you didn’t know about a default data-sharing setting that’s not an excuse because it’s your legal responsibility to know what any code you put on your website is doing with user data.

The DPA adds that “in the present case” it has focused the investigation on Disqus — providing publishers with an opportunity to get their houses in order ahead of any future checks it might make.

Norway’s DPA also has some admirably plain language to explain the “serious” problem of profiling people without their consent. “Hidden tracking and profiling is very invasive,” says Thon. “Without information that someone is using our personal data, we lose the opportunity to exercise our rights to access, and to object to the use of our personal data for marketing purposes.

“An aggravating circumstance is that disclosure of personal data for programmatic advertising entails a high risk that individuals will lose control over who processes their personal data.”

Zooming out, the issue of adtech industry tracking and GDPR compliance has become a major headache for DPAs across Europe — which have been repeatedly slammed for failing to enforce the law in this area since GDPR came into application in May 2018.

In the UK, for example (which transposed the GDPR before Brexit so still has an equivalent data protection framework for now), the ICO has been investigating GDPR complaints against real-time bidding’s (RTB) use of personal data to run behavioral ads for years — yet hasn’t issued a single fine or order, despite repeatedly warning the industry that it’s acting unlawfully.

The regulator is now being sued by complainants over its inaction.

Ireland’s DPC, meanwhile — which is the lead DPA for a swathe of adtech giants which site their regional HQ in the country — has a number of open GDPR investigations into adtech (including RTB). But has also failed to issue any decisions in this area almost three years after the regulation begun being applied.

Its lack of action on adtech complaints has contributed significantly to rising domestic (and European) pressure on its GDPR enforcement record more generally, including from the European Commission. (And it’s notable that the latter’s most recent legislative proposals in the digital arena include provisions that seek to avoid the risk of similar enforcement bottlenecks.)

The story on adtech and the GDPR looks a little different in Belgium, though, where the DPA appears to be inching toward a major slap-down of current adtech practices.

A preliminary report last year by its investigatory division called into question the legal standard of the consents being gathered via a flagship industry framework, designed by the IAB Europe. This so-called ‘Transparency and Consent’ framework (TCF) was found not to comply with the GDPR’s principles of transparency, fairness and accountability, or the lawfulness of processing.

A final decision is expected on that case this year — but if the DPA upholds the division’s findings it could deal a massive blow to the behavioral ad industry’s ability to track and target Europeans.

Studies suggest Internet users in Europe would overwhelmingly choose not to be tracked if they were actually offered the GDPR standard of a specific, clear, informed and free choice, without any loopholes or manipulative dark patterns.

With cybercrime on course to be a $6 trillion problem this year, organizations are throwing ever more resources at the issue to avoid being a target. Now, a startup that’s built a platform to help them stress-test the investments that they have made into their security IT is announcing some funding on the back of strong demand from the market for its tools.

Cymulate, which lets organizations and their partners run machine-based attack simulations on their networks to determine vulnerabilities and then automatically receive guidance around how to fix what is not working well enough, has picked up $45 million, funding that the startup — co-headquartered in Israel and New York — will be using to continue investing in its platform and to ramp up its operations after doubling its revenues last year on the back of a customer list that now numbers 300 large enterprises and mid-market companies, including the Euronext stock exchange network as well as service providers such as NTT and Telit.

London-based One Peak Partners is leading this Series C, with previous investors Susquehanna Growth Equity (SGE), Vertex Ventures Israel, Vertex Growth and Dell Technologies Capital also participating.

According to Eyal Wachsman, the CEO and co-founder, Cymulate’s technology has been built not just to improve an organization’s security, but an automated, machine-learning-based system to better understand how to get the most out of the security investments that have already been made.

“Our vision is to be the largest cybersecurity ‘consulting firm’ without consultants,” he joked.

The valuation is not being disclosed but as some measure of what is going on, David Klein, managing partner at One Peak, said in an interview that that he expects Cymulate to hit a $1 billion valuation within two years at the rate it’s growing and bringing in revenue right now. The startup has now raised $71 million, so it’s likely the valuation is in the mid-hundreds of millions. (We’ll continue trying to get a better number to have a more specific data point here.)

Cymulate — pronounced “sigh-mulate”, like the “cy” in “cyber” and a pun of “simulate”) is cloud-based but works across both cloud and on-premises environments and the idea is that it complements work done by (human) security teams both inside and outside of an organization, as well as the security IT investments — in terms of software or hardware) that they have already made.

“We do not replace — we bring back the power of the expert by validating security controls and checking whether everything is working correctly to optimize a company’s security posture,” Wachsman said. “Most of the time, we find our customers are using only 20% of the capabilities that they have. The main idea is that we have become a standard.”

The company’s tools are based in part on the MITRE ATT&CK framework, a knowledge base of threats, tactics and techniques used by a number of other cybersecurity services, including a number of others building continuous validation services that compete with Cymulate. These include the likes of FireEye, Palo Alto Networks, Randori, Khosla-backed AttackIQ and many more.

Although Cymulate is optimized to help customers better use the security tools they already have, it is not meant to replace other security apps, Wachsman noted, even if the by-product might become buying less of those apps in the future.

“I believe my message every day when talking with security experts is to stop buying more security products,” he said in an interview. “They won’t help defend you from the next attack. You can use what you’ve already purchased as long as you configure it well.”

In his words, Cymulate acts as a “black box” on the network, where it integrates with security and other software (it can also work without integrating but integrations allow for a deeper analysis). After running its simulations, it produces a map of the network and its threat profile, an executive summary of the situation that can be presented to management and a more technical rundown, which includes recommendations for mitigations and remediations.

Alongside validating and optimising existing security apps and identifying vulnerabilities in the network, Cymulate also has built special tools to fit different kinds of use cases that are particularly relevant to how businesses are operation today. They include evaluating remote working deployments, the state of a network following an M&A process, the security landscape of an organization that links up with third parties in supply chain arrangements, how well an organization’s security architecture is meeting (or potentially conflicting) with privacy and other kinds of regulatory compliance requirements, and it has built a “purple team” deployment, where in cases where security teams do not have the resources for running separate “red teams” to stress test something, blue teams at the organization can use Cymulate to build a machine learning-based “team” to do this.

The fact that Cymulate has built the infrastructure to run all of these processes speaks to a lot of potential of what more it could build, especially as our threat landscape, and how we do business, both continue to evolve. Even as it is, though, opportunity today is a massive one, with Gartner estimating that some $170 billion will be spent on information security by enterprises in 2022. That’s one reason why investors are here, too.

“The increasing pace of global cyber security attacks has resulted in a crisis of trust in the security posture of enterprises and a realization that security testing needs to be continuous as opposed to periodic, particularly in the context of an ever-changing IT infrastructure and rapidly evolving threats. Companies understand that implementing security solutions is not enough to guarantee protection against cyber threats and need to regain control,” said Klein, in a statement. “We expect Cymulate to grow very fast,” he told me more directly.

It was way back in 2018 that Omni:us appeared to disrupt the insurance market by applying AI to this most legacy of all industries. It has now gone on to raise $44.1 million. In a similar vein, Shift Technology in France has raised $100 million.

Now a UK startup aims to do something similar, but this time it will be coming out of the key market of the UK, where the insurance industry is enormous.

Sprout.ai is an insurtech startup that use AI to help instance companies to settle claims within 24 hours. It’s now raised £8m/$11m Series A round led by Octopus Ventures. The round was joined by existing investors, Amadeus Capital Partners, Playfair Capital and Techstars. It was Seed funded buy Amadeus in 2020.

Sprout.ai supplies global insurers, such as Zurich, with a product that applies NLP and OCR to insurance claims (which might involve such as handwritten doctors’ notes for instance) to enable them to be resolved faster, in not a dissimilar fashion to Omni:us and SHift. Sprout.ai says it now has deployments in Europe, South America and APAC.

Niels Thoné, CEO of Sprout.ai, said in a statement: “Sprout.ai’s mission is to revolutionize customer service within global claims automation. Our innovative and industry-leading AI claims engine is poised to solve the current market inefficiencies, allowing insurers to focus on customers in their moments of need.”

Nick Sando, early-stage fintech investor at Octopus Ventures, said: “We are often at our most vulnerable when we submit insurance claims, and it doesn’t help when we then have to wait another month for it to be processed. Sprout.ai empowers insurers to process claims in a fraction of the time, creating much better outcomes for customers when they need it most.”

As we can see, the market is hotting up for this kind of service, so it will be interesting see if these startups end up ‘land-locked’ to their language markets or not. Certainly, I can see M&A opportunities for whoever starts to lead the pack.

Lucid Motors is beefing up its executive and technical leadership team, hiring people from Waymo, Intel and Xperi as it prepares to become a publicly listed company. The automaker said Wednesday that Sherry House, who formerly worked at Waymo, will be its new chief financial officer.

House was at Waymo for four years, most recently as its as treasurer and head of investor relations. Prior to Waymo, she was vice president of corporate development at Visteon Corporation and managing director of technology, media and telecom at Deloitte Corporate Finance.

The electric vehicle automaker has also named Margaret Burgraff, who previously held positions at Apple and Intel, as vice president of software validation, Sanjay Chandra as vice president of Information Technology, and Jeff Curry as vice president of marketing and communications. Burgraff most recently served as vice president of global developer relations at Intel, where she was responsible for co-engineering and enabling global independent software vendors to work with Intel’s product portfolio. She was also a partner at Continuous Ventures, a global venture capital and private equity firm that primarily supports tech startups.

Chandra left his position as chief information officer and head of cloud of operations at TiVo/Xperi to join Lucid. He also worked a PayPal, Virgin Mobile and Workday. Curry most recently held a chief marketing level position at the Jaguar brand and had stints at Ferrari and Audi. Curry has also held marketing positions outside of automotive, including a vp-level at SiriusXM. He is the founding partner of brand strategy consultancy Mere Mortals.

The new hires comes just weeks before Lucid’s merger with special acquisition company Churchill Capital IV Corp. is expected to close, which officially make it a publicly traded company. The combined company, in which Saudi Arabia’s sovereign fund will continue to be the largest shareholder, will have a transaction equity value of $11.75 billion. Private investment in the public equity deal is priced at $15 a share, putting the implied pro-forma equity value at $24 billion. The private investment and cash from Churchill will provide roughly $4.4 billion in total funding to Lucid.

The public listing will provide Lucid the capital it needs to begin production of its first all-electric vehicle, the luxury Lucid Air. The company had originally intended to start production and the first deliveries in this spring, but pushed the date to the second half of the year. The Air will first come to North America, followed by Europe in 2022 and China in 2023.

Lucid is also aiming to bring a second vehicle, this time a performance luxury SUV called Gravity, to market in North America in 2023. The vehicles will be produced at its new factory in Casa Grande, Arizona. The initial phase of the $700 million factory was completed late last year and will have the capacity to produce 30,000 vehicles a year. Eventually, Lucid plans to expand the factory over another three phases to reach a production capacity of 365,000 units per year.

Flextock, one of the 10 African startups from the recent Y Combinator winter batch, has bagged an impressive pre-seed round just two months after graduation. 

The five-month-old company, which helps consumers and businesses manage e-commerce and fulfillment operations —  from warehousing and logistics to delivery and cash collection — has closed a $3.25 million pre-seed investment.

As it stands, this is a record high for the MENA region, which also had a record-high two months ago in fellow Egyptian and YC winter batch startup Dayra. The fintech company raised $3 million in debt and equity.

Mohamed Mossaad and Enas Siam founded Flextock in September 2020. However, the company didn’t launch until January 2021. When we covered the company in March, it had just raised $850,000 but CEO Mossaad made it clear that more was still to come.

The investors in this round include Egyptian VC Foundation Ventures, Y Combinator, MSA Capital, CRE Ventures, Alter Global, Jameel Investment Management Company (JIMCO), B&Y Ventures Partners and Access Bridge Ventures. The company also received angel investments from an unnamed Sequoia Capital scout, investors in the GCC region and Flexport.

Flextock currently serves the Egyptian market. It leverages proprietary software to offer merchants end-to-end e-commerce fulfillment and logistics solutions on demand. Since its launch, the company claims to have signed more than 100 merchants to its platform, with thousands of stock-keeping units (SKUs). The company also says it is growing 25% week-on-week. 

“In the last two months we launched different products to help merchants grow their brands more efficiently,” Mossaad told TechCrunch.” We’ve built various partnerships with different logistics services providers in the market to offer merchants an E2E experience, quadrupled the number of merchants and doubled the size of our team.”  

Flextock wants to capture a large portion of MENA’s $25 billion e-commerce logistics market, and Mossaad says the funding will help with that ambition. The company plans to put the funding into strengthening its presence in Egypt, technology, recruitment and regional expansion before the end of the year.

In the MENA region, Trella is another Egyptian logistics company backed by YC. The accelerator has now invested in four logistics and digital freight focused startups, including Nigeria’s Kobo and SEND, ever since it successfully backed Flexport in 2014.

Despite having a global operation, the freight forwarder is testing the waters in the MENA region — on the Flexport website, there’s a role for a Partnerships Manager, Turkey & Middle East. Although Flexport has freight forwarding and custom partners in the region, its interest in deepening reach in MENA might have spurred it to examine other opportunities. Flextock which provides e-commerce fulfillment appears to be one following the global freight provider’s “strategic investment” in the Egyptian company.

CEO Mossaad said that having Flexport onboard not only serves as a strong vote of confidence to the company’s growth potential but will help it build a regional interconnected network of e-commerce logistics services providers by leveraging their wide network of partners around the world.  

That said, it will be interesting to see how this investment plays out in the foreseeable future.

For Mazen Nadim, the managing partner at Foundation Ventures, Flextock’s e-commerce fulfillment and logistics play will be key to realizing the regional dominance it craves.

“We recognize the massive opportunity in logistics presented by the rise of e-commerce in the region,” he said. “Flextock is building the underlying infrastructure so that any e-commerce player can scale their operations on-demand.”

Flextock’s investment continues the series of seven-figure pre-seed rounds that have become more prevalent in the African tech scene. No less than six startups (including Flextock) have raised $1 million or more in this round in the past year. They include Egypt’s Zedny, Cassbana and Flick; and Nigeria’s Okra and Autochek, with the latter raising the largest pre-seed investment yet in Africa at $3.4 million.   

More money for the edtech boom: Munich-based StudySmarter, which makes digital tools to help learners of all ages swat up — styling itself as a ‘lifelong learning platform’ — has closed a $15 million Series A.

The round is led by sector-focused VC fund, Owl Ventures. New York-based Left Lane Capital is co-investing, along with Lars Fjeldsoe-Nielsen (ex WhatsApp, Uber and Dropbox; now GP at Balderton Capital), and existing early stage investor Dieter von Holtzbrinck Ventures (aka DvH Ventures).

The platform, which launched back in 2018 and has amassed a user-base of 1.5M+ learners — with a 50/50 split between higher education students and K12 learners, and with main markets so far in German speaking DACH countries in Europe — uses AI technologies like natural language processing (NLP) to automate the creation of text-based interactive custom courses and track learners’ progress (including by creating a personalized study plan that adjusts as they go along).

StudySmarter claims its data shows that 94% of learners achieve better grades as a result of using its platform.

While NLP is generally most advanced for the English language, the startup says it’s confident its NLP models can be transferred to new languages without requiring new training data — claiming its tech is “scalable in any language”. (Although it concedes its algorithms increase in accuracy for a given language as users upload more content so the software itself is undertaking a learning journey and will necessarily be at a different point on the learning curve depending on the source content.)

Here’s how StudySmarter works: Users input their study goals to get recommendations for relevant revision content that’s been made available to the platform’s community.

They can also contribute content themselves to create custom courses by uploading assets like lecture slides and revisions notes. StudySmarter’s platform can then turn this source material into interactive study aids — like flashcards and revision exercises — and the startup touts the convenience of the approach, saying it enables students to manage all their revision in one place (rather than wrangling multiple learning apps).

In short, it’s both a (revision) content marketplace and a productivity platform for learning — as it helps users create their own study (or lesson) plans, and offers them handy tools like a digital magic marker that automatically turns highlighted text into flashcards, while the resulting “smart” flashcards also apply the principle of spaced repetition learning to help make the studied content stick.

Users can choose to share content they create with other learners in the StudySmarter community (or not). The startup says a quarter (25%) of its users are creators, and that 80% of the content they create is shared. Overall, it says its platform provides access to more than 25 million pieces of shared content currently.

It’s topic agnostic, as you’d expect, so course content covers a diverse range of subjects. We’re told the most popular courses to study are: Economics, Medicine, Law, Computer Science, Engineering and school subjects such as Maths, Physics, Biology and English.

Regardless of how learners use it, the platform uses AI to nudge users towards relevant revision content and topics (and study groups) to keep extending and supporting their learning process — making adaptive, ongoing recommendations for other stuff they should check out.

“The ease of creating learning materials on the StudySmarter platform results in a democratization of high-quality educational content, driven by learners themselves,” is the claim.   

As well as user generated content (UGC), StudySmarter’s platform hosts content created by verified educationists and publishers — and there’s an option for users to search only for such verified content, i.e. if they don’t want to dip into the UGC pool.

“In general, there is no single workflow,” says co-founder and CMO Maurice Khudhir. “We created StudySmarter to adapt to different learner types. Some are very active learners and prefer to create content, some only want to search and consume content from other peers/publishers.”

“Our platform focuses on the art of learning itself, rather than being bound by topics, sectors, industries or content types. This means that anyone, regardless of what they’re learning, can use StudySmarter to improve how they learn. We started in higher education as it was the closest, most relevant market to where we were at the time of launch. We more recently expanded to K12, and are currently running our first corporate learning pilot.”

Gamification is a key strategy to encourage engagement and advance learning, with the platform dishing out encouraging words and emoji, plus rewards like badges and achievements based on the individual’s progress. Think of it as akin to Duolingo-style microlearning — but where users get to choose the subject (not just the language) and can feed in source material if they wish.

StudySmarter says it’s taken inspiration from tech darlings like Netflix and Tinder — baking in recommendation algorithms to surface relevant study content for users -(a la Netflix’s ‘watch next’ suggestions), and deploying a Tinder-swipe-style learning UI on mobile so that its “smart flashcards” can to adapt to users’ responses.

“Firstly, we individualise the learning experience by recommending appropriate content to the learner, depending on their demographics, demands and study goals,” explains Khudhir. “For instance, when an economics student uploads a PDF on the topic of marginal cost, StudySmarter will recommend several user-generated courses that cover marginal cost and/or several flashcards on marginal cost as well as e-books on StudySmarter that cover this topic.

“In this way, StudySmarter is similar to Netflix — Netflix will suggest similar TV shows and films depending on what you’ve already watched and StudySmarter will recommend different learning materials depending on the types of content and topics you interact with.

“As well, depending on how the student likes to learn, we also individualise the learning journey through things such as the smart flashcard learning algorithm. This is based on spaced repetition. For example, if a student is testing themselves on microeconomics, the flashcard set will go through different questions and responses and the student can swipe through the flashcards, in a similar way to Tinder. The flashcards’ sequence will adapt after every response.

“The notifications are also personalised — so they will remind the student to learn at particular points in the day, adapted to how the student uses the app.”

There’s also a scan functionality which uses OCR (optical character recognition) technology that lets users upload (paper-based) notes, handouts or books — and a sketch feature lets them carry out further edits, if they want to add more notes and scribbles.

Once ingested into the platform, this scanned (paper-based) content can of course also be used to create digital learning materials — extending the utility of the source material by plugging it into the platform’s creation and tracking capabilities.

“A significant cohort of users access StudySmarter on tablets, and they find this learning flow very useful, especially for our school-age pupils,” he adds.

StudySmarter can also offer educators and publishers detailed learning analytics, per Khudhir — who says its overarching goal is to establish itself as “the leading marketplace for educational content”, i.e. by using the information it gleans on users’ learning goals to directly recommend (relevant) professional content — “making it an extremely effective distribution platform”, as he puts it.

In addition to students, he says the platform is being used by teachers, professors, trainers, and corporate members — ie. to create content to share with their own students, team members, course participants etc, or just to publish publicly. And he notes a bit of a usage spike from teachers in March last year as the pandemic shut down schools in Europe. 

What about copyright? Khudir says they follow a three-layered system to minimize infringement risks — firstly by not letting users share or export any professional content hosted on the platform.

Uploaded documents like lecture notes and users’ own comments can be shared within one university course/class in a private learning group. But only UGC (like flashcards, summaries and exercises) can be shared freely with the entire StudySmarter community, if the user wants to.

“It’s important to note that no content is shared without the author’s permission,” he notes. “We also have a contact email for people to raise potential copyright infringements. Thanks to this system, we can say that we never had a single copyright issue with universities, professors or publishers.”

Another potential pitfall around UGC is quality. And, clearly, no student wants to waste their time revising from poor (or just plain wrong) revision notes.

StudySmarter says it’s limiting that risk by tracking how learners engage with shared content on the platform — in order to create quality scores for UGC — monitoring factors like how often such stuff is used for learning; how often the students who study from it answer questions correctly; and by looking the average learning time for a particular flashcard or summary, etc.

“We combine this with an active feedback system from the students to assign each piece of content a dynamic quality score. The higher the score is, the more often it is shown to new users. If the score falls below a certain threshold, the content is removed and is only visible to the original creator,” he goes on, adding: “We track the quality of shared content on the creator level so users who consistently share low-quality content can be banned from sharing more content on the platform.”

There are unlikely to be quality issues with verified educator/publisher content. But since it’s professional content, StudySmarter can’t expect to get it purely for free — so it says it “mostly” follows revenue-sharing agreements with these types of contributors.

It is also sharing data on learning trends and to help publishers reach relevant learners, as mentioned above. So the information it can provide education publishers about potential customers is probably the bigger carrot for pulling them in.

“We are very happy to say that the vast majority of our content is not created or shared on StudySmarter for any financial incentive but rather because our platform and technology simply make the creation significantly easier,” says Khudir, adding: “We have not paid a single Euro to any user on StudySmarter to create content and do not intend to do so going forward.” 

It’s still early days for monetization, which he says isn’t front of mind yet — with the team focused on building out the platform’s global reach — but he notes that the model allows for a number of b2b revenue streams, adding that they’ve been doing some early b2b monetization by working with employers and businesses to promote their graduate programs or to support recruitment drives. 

The new funding will be put towards product development and supporting the platform’s global expansion, per Khudir.

“We’ve run successful pilots in the U.K. and U.S. so they’re our primary focus to expand to by Q3 this year. In fact, following a test pilot in the U.K. in December, we became the number one education app within 24 hours (ahead of the likes of Duolingo, Quizlet, Kahoot, and Photomath), which bodes well!” he goes on. 

“Brazil, India and Indonesia are key targets for us due to a wider need for digital education. We’re also looking to launch in France, Nordics, Spain, Russia and many more countries. Due to the fact our platform is content-agnostic, and the technology that underpins it is universal, we’re able to scale effectively in multiple countries and languages. Within the next 12 months, we will be expanding to more than 12 countries and support millions of learners globally.”

StudySmarter’s subject-agnostic, feature-packed, one-stop-shop platform approach sets it apart from what Khudir refers to as “single-feature apps”, i.e. which just help you learn one thing — be that Duolingo (only languages), or apps that focus on teaching a particular skill-set (like Photomath for maths equations, or dedicated learn-to-code apps/courses (and toys)). 

But where the process of learning is concerned, there are lots of ways of going about it, and no one that suits everyone (or every subject), so there’s undoubtedly room for (and value in) a variety of approaches (which may happily operate in parallel). So it seems a safe bet that broad-brush learning platforms aren’t going to replace specialized tools — or (indeed) vice versa.

StudySmarter names the likes of Course Hero, StuDocu, Quizlet and Anki as taking a similar broad approach — while simultaneously claiming they’re not doing it in “quite the same, holistic, end-to-end, all-in-one bespoke platform for learners” way.  

Albeit, some of those edtech rivals are doing it with a lot more capital already raised. So StudySmarter is going to need to work smart and hard to localize and grab students’ attention as it guns for growth far beyond its European base.