Author: azeeadmin

It was, I admit, slightly strange not feeling the extreme anxiety over the holidays at having to return to Las Vegas this past year. But nature is healing. Vaccinations have begun rolling out in much of the world, and CES is ready to return.

The massive consumer electronic show’s governing board, the CTA, announced this morning that the event will return to the City of Second Chances January 5-8 (with media days eating into that post New Year’s glow starting on the 3rd). Per a press release, roughly 1,000 companies have committed to returning.

The list thus far includes, Amazon, AMD, AT&T, Daimler AG, Dell, Google, Hyundai, IBM, Intel, Lenovo, LG Electronics, Panasonic, Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and Sony. Given how the past year has gone, however, it’s important to note that everything is always subject to change.

“Our customers are enthusiastic about returning to a live event in Las Vegas,” CTA EVP Karen Chupka said in a release tied to the news. “Global brands and startups have shared that plans are already well underway and are committed to sharing the magic of an in-person CES with even more people from around the world.”

Of course, things will very much feel up in the air until our respective planes have landed at the Las Vegas Airport (and I may or may not still be wearing a mask). And the CTA is quick to note that there will continue to be a digital element. That will almost certainly continue to be an important aspect of these shows moving forward. Will it seemed unlikely that the pandemic would kill trade shows altogether (particularly hardware trade shows), like many things in life, there are some aspects that will simply never be the same.

We may still be a long way off from Level 5, fully self-driving cars on the open road, but companies building autonomous vehicles and shuttles for specific uses within closed-campus deployments say they are on their way to commercial operations and are raising money to get there. In the latest development, a startup out of Toulouse, France, called EasyMile — which builds shuttles for transporting both people and goods — has closed a Series B of €55 million ($66 million).

The funding is being led by Searchlight Capital Partners — the investor that just earlier this week appointed former FCC chairman Ajit Pai as its newest partner — with McWin and NextStage AM also participating. Previous investors rail industry heavyweight Alstom, Bpifrance and auto giant Continental also participated. Searchlight is also an investor in Get Your Guide and Univision.

EasyMile claims to be the world leader in autonomous shuttles with 60% of the global market using its vehicles. It says that its vehicles have racked up 800,000 kilometers in over 300 locations in 30 countries. But as a mark of how small and nascent that market is today, EasyMile also says that it has just 180 vehicles deployed worldwide. (One big competitor, Navya, also happens to be based out of France, interestingly.)

EasyMile said it will use the funds to scale its business, by securing and building out commercial deployments in closed-campus environments. It will also continue to invest in its longer term strategy, to deploy its vehicles and technology in public transportation networks, although the company said believes its focus on more immediate use cases is what has helped it grow and attract new investment.

“We have stayed focused on what we can deliver in a reasonable timeframe and partnered with leaders in niche markets that are addressable now,” said EasyMile Founder and CEO Gilbert Gagnaire in a statement. “The participation of all of EasyMile’s earlier investors in the round is a strong vote of confidence in our expansion plan, and we are very happy to welcome Searchlight, McWin and NextStage and look forward to accelerating our growth thanks to their expertise.”

EasyMile is not disclosing its valuation, nor how much it has raised to date in what it described as an oversubscribed round. We are asking the company and will update this post as we learn more.

EasyMile’s vehicles include the EZ10 people shuttles and TractEasy, an autonomous “tractor” trailer system for moving goods, and its over the years inked deals with companies like TLD (which runs ground transport and support in air cargo) and is currently working with the Peugeot, Chrysler and Fiat group Stellantis to build an autonomous vehicle using EasyMile technology.

The company has also had some setbacks. Last year, the NHTSA barred EasyMile from running any services with passengers on board after the company had an accident. (It can still operate vehicles without passengers.) We have asked the company to update us on the latest developments on this front.

On that front, it will be interesting to see how and if its new investor will have an impact in terms of helping with regulatory issues.

“We are excited to be investing in EasyMile at this critical juncture in the firm’s trajectory,” said Ralf Ackermann, a partner at Searchlight Capital, in a statement. “Having observed its robust, quality-driven approach and industry-leading technology, we are confident that it is well positioned to scale commercially and are delighted to be part of the journey.”

The fundraising is interesting in that it is coming at a time when we’re seeing some reshuffling and in some cases retrenchment in the autonomous driving space. Just this week Lyft sold off its Level 5 division to Toyota’s Woven Planet for $550 million. EasyMile believes that its continuing focus on specific markets around shuttles in closed-loops has helped it stay the course and build more traction and profile in what is still an early market and bound to go through more changes, and hiccups.

“This injection of capital validates EasyMile’s strategy and will allow us to finalize our technical development and finance our scaleup strategy. We’ll bring the technology up to a level that can be industrialized and deliver a real commercial service,” said GM Benoit Perrin, in a statement.

Every day in the United States, hundreds of thousands of people will dial 911 to seek help. Some of those calls are serious and require immediate emergency attention, but the reality is that most 911 calls are of a far simpler variety: concerns about a prescription, fear over a newly-developed symptom, or a general medical question.

When a 911 call taker receives that request for medical assistance, it sets into motion a series of responses. Ambulances and paramedics are sent, leading to skyrocketing costs for patients and insurers alike. What if instead of sending hyper-expensive emergency services to a non-emergency situation, call takers had an ally to guide patients to the resources they actually need?

MD Ally is a startup that triages 911 calls and reroutes non-emergency calls to telehealth medical services. The company closed $3.5 million in seed funding led by Hemant Teneja at General Catalyst, along with Tuoyo Louis of Seae Ventures. The company formerly raised $1 million in financing last March.

Shanel Fields, the CEO and founder of the company, said that the impetus for the company came from a very early age. “It goes back to my own childhood — my father was a volunteer EMT when I was growing up on Long Island,” she said, and that interest in healthcare brought her to Athenahealth.

CEO and founder of MD Ally Shanel Fields. Image Credits: MD Ally

She kept thinking about 911 calls though, and the disparities that exist between different communities when it comes to response times. “Whether you have $5 dollars in your pocket or $5 million — you call the same number,” she said. But I “read some research that in low-income and indigent communities, they had higher rates of ‘dead on arrival’ due to higher wait times.” The reason was simple: in communities with less access to healthcare, emergency services are often the only alternative, leading to higher volumes of 911 calls with many that would be considered low priority.

That gave her the idea for MD Ally — to improve the efficiency of dispatching so that emergencies got first care, and that non-emergency calls could also be helpfully routed to improve clinical outcomes. She officially started building the company in Fall of 2019, and joined up with Kojo DeGraft-Hanson, who is the company’s chief product officer. The two have known each other for a decade from Cornell, and they stayed in touch as each pursued their own careers.

The company integrates into the computer-aided dispatch systems used by 911 operations centers (known more formally as Public Safety Answering Points or PSAPs). Today, when a 911 call comes in, call takers determine the acuity of the medical danger involved using an Advanced Medical Priority Dispatch System, a uniform process for coding each call by severity. MD Ally has established a range of codes that call takers can safely redirect to telehealth treatment options.

Best of all for cash-strapped 911 centers, MD Ally’s platform is free. The company instead intends to generate revenues on the provider side for telehealth referrals as well as from insurance companies looking to reduce the cost of emergency medical services. The company is integrating with centers in New York and Florida now and by the end of the year, hopes to also have centers on board in Louisiana, California, and Arizona.

Long-term, the company hopes to help deescalate situations where 911 callers, who might be experiencing mental illness, are sent police response rather than psychological services. We’re “really passionate about and excited to provide a range of resources to deescalate scenarios,” Fields said.

Data intelligence company Near is announcing the acquisition of another company in the data business — UM.

In some ways, this echoes Near’s acquisition of Teemo last fall. Just as that deal helped Singapore-headquartered Near expand into Europe (with Teemo founder and CEO Benoit Grouchko becoming Near’s chief privacy officer), CEO Anil Mathews said that this new acquisition will help Near build a presence in the United States, turning the company into “a truly global organization,” while also tailoring its product to offer “local flavors” in each country.

The addition of UM’s 60-person team brings Near’s total headcount to around 200, with UM CEO Gladys Kong becoming CEO of Near North America.

At the same time, Mathews suggested that this deal isn’t simply about geography, because the data offered by Near and UM are “very complementary,” allowing both teams to upsell current customers on new offerings. He described Near’s mission as “merging two diverse worlds, the online world and the offline world,” essentially creating a unified profile of consumers for marketers and other businesses. Apparently, UM is particularly strong on the offline side, thanks to its focus on location data.

Near CEO Anil Mathews and UM CEO Gladys Kong

“UM has a very strong understanding of places, they’ve mastered their understanding of footfalls and dwell times,” Mathews added. “As a result, most of the use cases where UM is seeing growth — in tourism, retail, real estate — are in industries struggling due to the pandemic, where they’re using data to figure out, ‘How do we come out of the pandemic?'”

TechCrunch readers may be more familiar with UM under its old name UberMedia, which created social apps like Echofon and UberSocial before pivoting its business to ad attribution and location data. Kong said that contrary to her fears, the company had “an amazing 2020” as businesses realized they needed UM’s data (its customers include RAND Corporation, Hawaii Tourism Authority, Columbia University and Yale University).

And the year was capped by connecting with Near and realizing that the two companies have “a lot of synergies.” In fact, Kong recalled that UM’s rebranding last month was partly at Mathews’ suggestion: “He said, ‘Why do you have media in your name when you don’t do media?’ And we realized that’s probably how the world saw us, so we decided to change [our name] to make it clear what we do.”

Founded in 2010, UM raised a total of $34.6 million in funding, according to Crunchbase. The financial terms of the acquisition were not disclosed.

Opsera, a startup that’s building an orchestration platform for DevOps teams, today announced that it has raised a $15 million Series A funding round led by Felicis Ventures. New investor HMG Ventures, as well as existing investors Clear Ventures, Trinity Partners and Firebolt Ventures also participated in this round, which brings the company’s total funding to $19.3 million.

Founded in January 2020, Opsera lets developers provision their CI/CD tools through a single framework. Using this framework, they can then build and manage their pipelines for a variety of use cases, including their software delivery lifecycle, infrastructure as code and their SaaS application releases. With this, Opsera essentially aims to help teams set up and operate their various DevOps tools.

The company’s two co-founders, Chandra Ranganathan and Kumar Chivukula, originally met while working at Symantec a few years ago. Ranganathan then spent the last three years at Uber, where he ran that company’s global infrastructure. Meanwhile, Chivukula ran Symantec’s hybrid cloud services.

Image Credits: Opsera

“As part of the transformation [at Symantec], we delivered over 50+ acquisitions over time. That had led to the use of many cloud platforms, many data centers,” Ranganathan explained. “Ultimately we had to consolidate them into a single enterprise cloud. That journey is what led us to the pain points of what led to Opsera. There were many engineering teams. They all had diverse tools and stacks that were all needed for their own use cases.”

The challenge then was to still give developers the flexibility to choose the right tools for their use cases, while also providing a mechanism for automation, visibility and governance — and that’s ultimately the problem Opsera now aims to solve.

Image Credits: Opsera

“In the DevOps landscape, […] there is a plethora of tools, and a lot of people are writing the glue code,” Opsera co-founder Chivukula noted. “But then they’re not they don’t have visibility. At Opsera, our mission and goal is to bring order to the chaos. And the way we want to do this is by giving choice and flexibility to the users and provide no-code automation using a unified framework.”

Wesley Chan, a managing director for Felicis Ventures who will join the Opsera board, also noted that he believes that one of the next big areas for growth in DevOps is how orchestration and release management is handled.

“We spoke to a lot of startups who are all using black-box tools because they’ve built their engineering organization and their DevOps from scratch,” Chan said. “That’s fine, if you’re starting from scratch and you just hired a bunch of people outside of Google and they’re all very sophisticated. But then when you talk to some of the larger companies. […] You just have all these different teams and tools — and it gets unwieldy and complex.”

Unlike some other tools, Chan argues, Opsera allows its users the flexibility to interface with this wide variety of existing internal systems and tools for managing the software lifecycle and releases.

“This is why we got so interested in investing, because we just heard from all the folks that this is the right tool. There’s no way we’re throwing out a bunch of our internal stuff. This would just wreak havoc on our engineering team,” Chan explained. He believes that building with this wide existing ecosystem in mind — and integrating with it without forcing users onto a completely new platform — and its ability to reduce friction for these teams, is what will ultimately make Opsera successful.

Opsera plans to use the new funding to grow its engineering team and accelerate its go-to-market efforts.

By his own admission, Chris Thür wasn’t the most obvious person to start a music education startup.

Thür (previously a laser researcher) recalled an early meeting with an investor who asked whether he and co-founder Mikko Kaipainen (an electrical engineer) were music teachers or musicians, ultimately going “down the list of all the things that would somewhat qualify us for that world.” Each time, they had to tell him no.

“We were just two people who wanted to play an instrument and felt we were missing out,” Thür said. “Obviously, we were not the only ones.”

While they didn’t convince that unnamed investor to write a check, Thür and Kaipainen did start Yousician, which now reaches 20 million monthly users across its two apps — the music education app Yousician and the guitar tuning app GuitarTuna. And the Helsinki-based startup is announcing today that it has raised $29 million in Series B funding.

Thür (Yousician’s CEO) said that it’s been “a bit of a journey” to get here. The company, previously known as Ovelin, was founded a decade ago, and it originally focused exclusively on kids before finding success with a less age-specific strategy.

Yousician CEO Chris Thür

He described the Yousician app as providing an interactive, gamified approach to learning guitar, piano, ukulele, bass or singing — but not too game-like. Users advance through a standard syllabus, playing for 15 or 20 minutes a day, with the app listening to their performance and awarding one to three stars based on how many mistakes they made. Users get one lesson per day for free, but if they want access to more lessons and the full library of songs (or if they want to learn multiple instruments), they need to sign up for a Premium or Premium+ subscription, with pricing starting at $19.99 per month.

Thür said Yousician allows people to learn music on their own schedule, at a much lower cost than in-person lessons. At the same time, he suggested that it’s not a “zero sum” competition with music teachers; there are teachers who recommend Yousician to their students as a way to keep practicing and learning between lessons.

As an example of how Yousician can help its users, Thür pointed to the story of Karen Gadd, who (as told in the video below) “in one year went from never having played an instrument to performing on-stage” with her band — though he hastened to add that the app is beneficial even if you never perform for anyone else.

“We want to make musicality to be as common as literacy,” Thür said. “Everyone should play from time to time and get all those benefits […] I think learning with a teacher works for many, but unfortunately it doesn’t work for everyone.”

The past year, he said, has been “a difficult year and an interesting year for us.” With students largely shifting to remote learning, “a lot of music lessons didn’t happen,” so Yousician tried to make up for some of those lost lessons by providing free premium subscriptions to more than 100,000 teachers and students.

At the same time, many people became interested in learning an instrument during the pandemic as part of a general focus on self-improvement, leading to “a huge organic increase” in usage. Monthly users grew from 14.5 million to 20 million, while subscriptions increased 80%, with the company bringing in revenue of $50 million last year.

Yousician has now raised a total of $35 million. True Ventures led the round, with participation from new investors Amazon’s Alexa Fund and MPL Ventures, as well as Zynga founder Mark Pincus, LAUNCH Fund founder Jason Calacanis, Unity Technologies founder David Helgason, Trivago co-founder Rolf Schrömgens, Cooler Future founder Moaffak Ahmed and Blue Bottle Coffee Company executive chairman Bryan Meehan.

“Yousician has been the leading platform for music instruction for nearly a decade, and people – now more than ever – are turning to the pursuit of creativity and music with renewed vigor,” said True Ventures co-founder Jon Callaghan in a statement. “We’re proud to stand behind a company and team that brings the joy and excitement of playing an instrument into more homes and families.”

Thür said that with the new funding, Yousician will work the team, improve brand marketing, localize the product and build more relationships with musical artists.

MessageBird, a communications platform out of the Netherlands, had a busy day today with two huge announcements. For starters, the company got an $800 million extension on its $200 million Series C round announced last October. It then applied $600 million of the extension to buy email marketing platform SparkPost. The company’s C round now totals at least $1 billion.

Let’s start with the acquisition. MessageBird CEO Robert Vis says his company had an email component prior to the acquisition, but the chance to pick up the largest email provider in the world was too good to pass up.

“If you talk about infrastructure, we’re defining largest […] as a matter of interactions, so basically the amount of emails sent. SparkPost sends about 5 trillion emails a year. And the second thing that’s very important to us is to be able to send high scale emails when it’s really critical,” Vis told me.

With the company in the fold, it enables MessageBird, which has mostly been in Europe and Asia, to get a stronger foothold in the U.S. market. “So this is as much for us about the technology around SparkPost as it actually is for us to have market entry into the United States with a significant workforce instead of having to build that from scratch,” Vis said.

Rich Harris, CEO of SparkPost sees the deal as a way to expand SparkPost to multiple channels already available on the MessageBird platform and be a much more powerful combination together than it could have been alone.

“By joining forces with MessageBird, we will be able to bring broader, deeper value to all of our customers through any digital communications,” Harris said in a statement.

Vis agrees saying it gives his company the opportunity to upsell other MessageBird services to SparkPost customers. “SparkPost obviously only offers email. We can offer SmartPost customers way more channels. We can offer them texting, Instagram, WhatsApp or Apple Business Chat. So we feel very excited about leveraging them to go sell much more broad messenger products to their customers,” Vis said.

MessageBird announced its $240 million Series C on a $3 billion valuation last October. The company’s whopping $800 million extension brings the round to around $1 billion. It’s worth noting that the round isn’t completely closed yet, so that’s not an official figure.

“The round isn’t completely closed yet as we are still waiting on some of the funds to come in, so we cannot give you 100% final figures on the round, but we can say with confidence that the round will close at $1B or slightly higher,” a company spokesperson explained. It is announcing the funding before everything is 100% done due to regulatory requirements around the acquisition.

Eurazeo, Tiger Global, BlackRock and Owl Rock participated in the extension along with Bonnier, Glynn Capital, LGT Lightstone, Longbow, Mousse Partners and NewView Capital, as well as existing investors such as Accel, Atomico (they led the Series A and B rounds) and Y Combinator. The mix is 70% equity and 30% debt, according to the company.

Today’s acquisition comes on the heels of two others just last month when the company announced it was acquiring video meeting startup 24Sessions and Hull, a synchronization technology startup. The company also acquired Pusher, a push notification company in January, as MessageBird is using its Series C cash to quickly expand the platform.

There are lot of companies out there making robotic exoskeletons. In fact, it’s one of the more active categories in the space — and for good reason. These sorts of technologies have the ability to profoundly impact the future of how people work, move and rehabilitate.

The category also houses a surprisingly broad range of solutions, with something like the sci-fi Sarcos at one end and Roam on the other. Roam’s solution is really putting the wearable back in wearable robotics. Specifically, the company makes assistive devices out of fabrics, rather than metal or plastic.

Ultimately, that means the loss of some of the strength of more industrial solutions, but it also means they’re more suited for every day use. That’s precisely why something like the robotic smart knee orthosis makes a lot of sense. The product, which recently cleared the FDA as a Class I medical device, utilizes AI for an adapted technology that senses the wearer’s movements and adjusts accordingly.

Image Credits: Roam Robotics

“Roam is focused on a massively underserved market. More than 20% of the global population is limited by their body’s mobility, and as medical advancements help people live longer that number is only going to increase,” co-founder and CEO Tim Swift said in a release tied to the news. “Our approach to wearable robotics works seamlessly with the human body to help people lead healthier, happier and more active lives, unhindered by physical limitations.”

The product, which joins the company’s skier and military-focused offers, sports embedded sensors that can detect things like movement up and down stairs and standing up from a seated position. It utilizes a power source and air compressor to create motion to assist in movement.

The device is up for preorder and starts shipping later this summer.

Merama, a five-month old e-commerce startup focused on Latin America, announced today that it has raised $60 million in seed and Series A funding and $100 million in debt.

The money was raised “at well over a $200 million valuation,” according to co-founder and CEO Sujay Tyle.  

“We are receiving significant inbound for a Series B already,” he said.

LatAm firms Valor Capital and Monashees Capital and U.K.-based Balderton Capital co-led the “massively oversubscribed” funding round, which also included participation from Silicon Valley-based Triplepoint Capital and the CEOs of four unicorns in Latin America, including Uala, Loggi, Rappi and Madeira Madeira. 

Tyle, Felipe Delgado, Olivier Scialom, Renato Andrade and Guilherme Nosralla started Merama in December 2020 with a vision to be the “largest and best-selling set of brands in Latin America.” The company has dual headquarters in Mexico City and São Paulo.

Merama partners with e-commerce product sellers in Latin America by purchasing a stake in the businesses and working with their teams to help them “exponentially” grow and boost their technology while providing them with nondilutive working capital. CEO Tyle describes the company’s model as “wildly different” from that of Thras.io, Perch and other similar companies such as Valoreo because it does not aggregate dozens of brands.

“We will work with very few brands over time, and only the best, and work with our entire team to scale and expand these few businesses,” Tyle told TechCrunch. “We’re more similar to The Hut Group in the EU.”

Merama expects to sell $100 million across the region this year, more than two times the year before. It is currently focused on Mexico, Brazil, Argentina and Chile. Already, the company operates “very profitably,” according to Tyle. So the cash raised will go primarily toward partnering with more brands, investing in building its technology platform “to aid in the automation of several facets” of its partners’ brands and in working capital for product innovation and inventory purchases. 

The 42-person team is made up of e-commerce leaders from companies such as Amazon, Mercado Libre and Facebook, among others. Tyle knows a thing or two about growing and building new startups, having co-founded Frontier Car Group, which sold to OLX/Naspers for about $700 million in 2019. He is also currently a venture partner at Balderton. 

It’s a fact that Latin American e-commerce has boomed, particularly during the pandemic. Mexico was the fastest-growing e-commerce market in 2020 worldwide, yet is still in its infancy, Tyle said. Overall, the $85 billion e-commerce market in Latin America is growing rapidly, with projections of it reaching $116.2 billion in 2023.

“Merchants are seeing hypergrowth but still struggle with fundamental problems, which creates a ceiling in their potential,” Tyle told TechCrunch. “For example, they are unable to expand internationally, get reliable and cost-effective working capital and build technology tools to support their own online presence. This is where Merama comes in. We seek to give our partners an unfair advantage. When we decide to work with a team, it is because we believe they will be the de facto category leader and can become a $1 billion business on their own.”

Merama collaborates with e-commerce giants such as Amazon and Mercado Libre, and several executives from both companies have invested in the startup, as well.

Daniel Waterhouse, partner at Balderton Capital, says his firm sees “huge potential” in Merama.

“In our two decades scaling businesses in Europe, we have seen firsthand what defines eCommerce category leaders,” he said in a written statement. “What they have already achieved is breathtaking, and it is just the tip of the iceberg.”

Valor Capital founding partner Scott Sobel believes that creating superior products that connect with consumers is the first key challenge D2C companies face.

“That is why we like Merama’s approach to partnering with these established brands and provide them unparalleled support to scale their operations in an efficient way,” he added.

Group video calls will be coming to Telegram’s messaging platform next month with what’s being touted as a fully featured implementation, including support for web-based videoconferencing.

Founder Pavel Durov made the announcement via a (text) message posted to his official Telegram channel today where he wrote “we will be adding a video dimension to our voice chats in May, making Telegram a powerful platform for group video calls”.

“Screen sharing, encryption, noise-cancelling, desktop and tablet support — everything you can expect from a modern video conferencing tool, but with Telegram-level UI, speed and encryption. Stay tuned!” he added, using the sorts of phrases you’d expect from an enterprise software maker.

Telegram often taunts rivals over their tardiness to add new features but on video calls it has been a laggard, only adding the ability to make one-on-one video calls last August — rather than prioritizing a launch of group video calls, as it had suggested it would a few months earlier.

In an April 2020 blog post, to mark passing 400M users, it wrote that the global lockdown had “highlighted the need for a trusted video communication tool” — going on to dub video calls in 2020 “much like messaging in 2013”.

However it also emphasized the importance of security for group video calling — and that’s perhaps what’s caused the delay.

(Another possibility is the operational distraction of needing to raise a large chunk of debt financing to keep funding development: Last month Telegram announced it had raised over $1BN by selling bonds — its earlier plan to monetize via a blockchain platform having hit the buffers in 2020.)

In the event, rather than rolling out group video calls towards the latter end of 2020 it’s going to be doing so almost half way through 2021 — which has left videoconferencing platforms like Zoom to keep cleaning up during the pandemic-fuelled remote work and play boom (even as ‘Zoom fatigue’ has been added to our lexicon).

How secure Telegram’s implementation of group video calls will be, though, is an open question.

Durov’s post mades repeat mention of “encryption” — perhaps to make a subtle dig at Zoom’s own messy security claims history — but doesn’t specify whether it will use end-to-end encryption (we’ve asked).

Meanwhile Zoom does now offer e2e — and also has designs on becoming a platform in its own right, with apps and a marketplace, so there are a number of shifts in the comms landscape that could see the videoconferencing giant making deeper incursions into Telegram’s social messaging territory.

The one-to-one video calls Telegram launched last year were rolled out with its own e2e encryption — so presumably it will be replicating that approach for group calls.

However the MTProto encryption Telegram uses is custom-designed — and there’s been plenty of debate among cryptography experts over the soundness of its approach. So even if group calls are e2e encrypted there will be scrutiny over exactly how Telegram is doing it.

Also today, Durov touted two recently launched web versions of Telegram (not the first such versions by a long chalk, though) — adding that it’s currently testing “a functional version of web-based video calls internally, which will be added soon”.

He said the Webk and Webz versions of the web app are “by far the most cross-platform versions of Telegram we shipped so far”, and noting that no downloads or installs are required to access your chats via the browser.

“This is particularly good for corporate environments where installing native apps is now always allowed, but also good for users who like the instant nature of web sites,” he added, with another little nod toward enterprise users.