Author: azeeadmin

Electric scooters powered by Gogoro’s swappable, rechargeable batteries now account for nearly a quarter of monthly sales in Taiwan, its home market. But one of the most frequent questions co-founder and chief executive officer Horace Luke gets asked is when will Gogoro launch its scooters in other countries.

“I always said, ‘we’re getting ready, we’re getting ready, we’re getting ready,” he told TechCrunch. Gogoro answered that question today by announcing a strategic partnership with Hero MotoCorp, one of the world’s largest two-wheeled vehicle maker and the market leader in India, where it is headquartered.

Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp’s agreement includes a joint venture to build a battery swapping network in India. Hero MotoCorp will also launch electric two-wheelers based on Gogoro technology under its own brand. This will mark the first time the company has launched electric vehicles. (The partnership is not to be confused with Hero Electric, which is run by relatives of Hero MotoCorp’s founders, but is a separate company).

The deal will focus on India before expanding into Hero MotoCorp’s other markets (it serves a total of 40 countries). Details, like the first vehicle, launch cities and pricing, will be announced later, but Luke said Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp “are deploying very rapidly.”

Luke described the strategic partnership as a validation of Gogoro’s goal to become a battery swapping and smart mobility platform, packaging its technology as a turnkey solution for companies that want to produce energy-efficient vehicles.

“We designed our technology, capabilities and business model in the hope that one day we can solicit a giant like Hero,” said Luke.

The first Gogoro Smartscooter was launched in 2015. Since then, it has struck partnerships with manufacturers like Yamaha, PGO and A-Motor to build electric scooters with its technology under their own brands, but Gogoro’s international rollout has been very gradual: for example, a delivery fleet in South Korea and a partnership with the now-defunct scooter-sharing service Coup in Europe. Its first product launch in the United States was for Eeyo, its electric bike brand, instead of scooters.

Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp have been talking for more than a year and Luke described the the strategic partnership as one of the most important deals the company has made so far.

“In order to make a massive change, we need really massive adoption, and Taiwan has served really well as a pilot market for us to develop technology, refine it and show the world that it is possible, through this swap-and-go technology rather than tethered plug-and-charge scenario, for lightweight personal mobility to take off,” said Luke.

But India is obviously a much larger market, in terms of geography and population, than Taiwan. The Indian government wants to put more electric vehicles on the road with subsidy programs, and the high cost of fuel in the country is another incentive for people to make the switch from gas to electric. One major barrier for many consumers, however, is “range anxiety,” or concerns about how long their electric vehicle can run on a charge.

This is why Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp’s swapping station joint venture is important. In Taiwan, Gogoro now has more than 375,000 riders and 2,000 battery swapping/charging stations, which handle 265,000 swaps a day. That density is a key selling point because riders can find a nearby swapping station quickly through Gogoro’s smartphone app.

Gogoro’s batteries and charging stations are connected to its Gogoro Network cloud service, which monitors the condition of battery and manages how quickly they are charged. This allows the batteries to last longer–Luke said that the company has not retired any of its Smart Batteries in six years. Data from the Gogoro Network also shows the company where it needs to place more stations. In India, Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp will start with densely-populated areas, before adding stations based on demand, similar to Gogoro’s approach to its network in Taiwan.

After India, Gogoro and Hero MotoCorp plan to enter other markets, furthering Gogoro’s international expansion.

“What is really important about this partnership is their influence on the two-wheel market, and the importance of the two-wheel market in emerging markets,” said Luke.

In a press statement, Hero MotoCorp chairman and CEO Dr. Pawan Munjal said the strategic partnership is an extension of the research and development has already put into creating an electric vehicle portfolio.

“Today marks another major milestone in our journey, as we bring Hero’s leadership in two-wheelers, our global scale and innovation powerhouse, with the leadership of Gogoro in the swapping business model, as they have demonstrated over the years in Taiwan and the rest of the world,” Munjal added.

 

Tel Aviv’s Orca AI, a computer vision startup that can be retrofitted to cargo ships and improve navigation and collision avoidance, has raised $13 million in a Series A funding, taking its total raised to over $15.5 million. While most cargo ships carry security cameras, computer vision cameras are rare. Orca AI hopes its solution could introduce autonomous guidance to vessels already at sea.

There are over 4,000 annual marine incidents, largely due to human error. The company says this is getting worse as the Coronavirus pandemic makes it harder for regular crew changes. The recent events in the Suez Canal have highlighted how crucial this industry is.

The funding round was led by OCV Partners, with Principal Zohar Loshitzer joining Orca AI’s board. Mizmaa Ventures and Playfair Capital also featured.

The company was founded by naval technology experts, Yarden Gross and Dor Raviv. The latter is an former Israel navy computer vision expert. Customers include Kirby, Ray Car Carriers and NYK.

Orca AI’s AI-based navigation and vessel tracking system supports ships in difficult to tricky to navigate situations and congested waterways, using vision sensors, thermal and low light cameras, plus algorithms that look at the environment and alert crews to dangerous situations.

On the raise, Yarden Gross, CEO, and co-founder said: “The maritime industry… is still far behind aviation with technological innovations. Ships deal with increasingly congested waterways, severe weather and low-visibility conditions creating difficult navigation experiences with often expensive cargo… Our solution provides unique insight and data to any ship in the world, helping to reduce these challenging situations and collisions in the future.” 

Zohar Loshitzer, Principal from OCV added: “Commercial shipping has historically been a highly regulated and traditional industry. However, we are now “witnessing a positive change in the adoption of tech solutions to increase safety and efficiency.

Samsung announced Galaxy Upcycling a few years back, but has largely been quiet on that front, aside from some stage time at CES back in January. Today the company announced that Upcycling at Home is being opened to beta today for users in the U.S., Korea and the U.K.

It’s a pretty novel program, in a world where consumers are encouraged to scrap their old devices every two to three years for something shiny and new. The program is designed to breathe new life into handsets that might otherwise be tossed in a landfill or stashed away in a drawer.

“We are rethinking how we use existing resources, and we believe the key to upcycling is to enable solutions that transform old technology into something new by adding value,” VP Sung-Koo Kim said in a release tied to the news. “We are committed to integrating sustainable practices into our day-to-day lives, and through Galaxy Upcycling at Home, users can join our journey toward a more sustainable future.”

Specifically, the products can be revamped into smart home devices, like childcare and pet monitors.

The feature can be accessed within the SmartThings Labs feature found in Samsung’s SmartThings App. When enabled, the product can send alerts when things like a crying baby or barking dog are detected. The recorded sound will be sent as part of the alert. Another feature uses built-in sensors to turn on a room’s lights when things get dark. The service will optimize device battery so it can operate for an extended period while detecting these inputs.

 

Excel and Google Sheets can only address pure ‘number crunching’ in a limited way. A new UK startup, Causal hopes to tackle this issue and has now raised a $4.2 million seed round led by Accel. Existing investors Coatue, Passion Capital, Verissimo Ventures, Naval Ravikant, Varadh Jain and others, also participated. The raise brings Causal’s total funding to $5.5 million, which the company will use to grow the engineering team and launch on Product Hunt next month.

Despite the fact that spreadsheets are crucial to normal business operations, there are multiple use cases for sales teams, finances teams etc, all of which are very different. Causal hopes to address these with a more data-driven, collaborative approach.

Founded in 2019 by Taimur Abdaal and Lukas Koebis, Causal is “aiming to replace Excel” by starting with the spreadsheet’s foundation: formulas”. Causal says its formulas “read like plain English” such “as Profit = Revenue – Costs” and also claims it typically takes “100x fewer formulas” in Causal to build exactly the same model in Excel.

“Business planning and forecasting should involve every team in a company, but the complexity of spreadsheets means that it’s often siloed within finance,” said Taimur Abdaal, CEO and co-founder in a statement. “We want to democratize this process with a truly horizontal product that every knowledge worker can use, and we’re excited to have Accel join us on the next phase of our journey.”

Over a call Abdaal told me: “We started really because we saw how difficult it is to actually work with numbers and spreadsheets. You have these esoteric formulas that are really hard to understand which is why something like 80% of spreadsheets have errors in them. Spreadsheets are also really disconnected from the other tools that companies use. Finance teams typically spend days with everyone manually pulling in data from accounting systems. So, these are some of the problems that we’re trying to solve. Right now we are a pretty small team of five, mostly engineers, and we’re really focused on building a very horizontal product that every team in a company can use for number crunching. As a seed investment it’s really, really nice because it lets us double down on some of the traction that we’ve gotten.”

“Many of us have felt the pain that comes with building and managing large spreadsheets across teams and data sources firsthand,” added Seth Pierrepont, Partner at Accel. “Taimur and Lukas are talented, product-focused founders who have taken the intuitive Excel-like interface that we’re all familiar with, and supercharged it with data integrations, collaboration features, and high-quality visualizations. Beyond that, they’ve leveraged their data science and mathematics backgrounds to offer sophisticated models out of the box, giving all users the ability to harness much more powerful predictive capabilities.”

The last five years have seen a plethora of fintech applications in Nigeria (and Africa, in general) grow at an astonishing rate. But most of these companies and developers find it difficult to access real-time banking data. This, in turn, creates a bottleneck when onboarding and verifying customers.

Since 2019, Plaid-esque companies, but with different twists to their offerings, have emerged to solve these issues. Today, Nigeria’s Okra, arguably the first to gain mainstream attention, is announcing that it has closed a seed round of $3.5 million.

U.S.-based Susa Ventures led this latest tranche of investment. Other investors include TLcom Capital (the sole investor from its $1 million pre-seed round in 2020), newly joined Accenture Ventures and some angel investors. In total, Okra has raised $4.5 million in two rounds and the company will use the investment to expand its data infrastructure across Nigeria.   

Okra likes to describe itself as an API “super-connector” that creates a secure portal and process to exchange real-time financial information between customers, applications and banks.

Fara Ashiru Jituboh and David Peterside founded the company in June 2019. Since its launch in January 2020, Okra has aggressively pushed by connecting to all banks in Nigeria and even claims to have a 99.9% guaranteed uptime. 

Its business model provides integrations to developers and businesses into existing banking services and takes commissions off subsequent transactions. These integrations include accounts authorization, balance, identity, income, payments and transactions. Per partners (developers and businesses), they are well over 100 with some big names like Access Bank, Aella, Interswitch and uLesson.

Ashiru Jituboh tells TechCrunch that besides making APIs, Okra is in the business of selling “digital first-experiences and transformation”.

“We are building an open finance infrastructure that enables developers and businesses to offer digital-first experiences and financial products,” she said. “We’re at a point where businesses are realizing that digital transformation is one of the most conversation happening in most boardrooms. So for us, we’re essentially just making tools and services needed to achieve digital transformation at scale with our APIs.”

Positioning the company in such a way might be the reason for its immense growth in over a year. The company says it has recorded over 150,000 live API calls noticing an average month-on-month API call growth of 281%. Okra has also analyzed more than 20 million transactions; last month, it analyzed 27.5% of this figure at over 5.5 million transaction lines. For a bit of context, Plaid has analyzed more than 10 billion transactions in its eight years of existence.

“I think it’s a good indicator that we’re on the right trajectory in terms of traction,” COO Peterside added.

If anything one can learn from the Nigerian fintech ecosystem over the past two years is that with growth comes regulatory scrutiny. Since last year, different regulatory moves from some of the country’s financial bodies have been targeted toward payments, crypto and wealth tech startups. While these regulators claim to foster the interests of the Nigerian public and protect consumers, their moves reek of innovation stifling and jurisdictional play.

So far, these regulators appear not to be concerned with the activities of API fintech infrastructure startups. But will they be prepared to deal with the situation should that change?

According to Peterside, Okra is preparing for unforeseen circumstances by taking the initiative and engaging with the regulators in its space. Since 2018 when the EU released the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to deal with data protection and violations resulting from it, most African countries have mirrored these laws for their region. In Nigeria, there’s the Nigeria Data Protection Regulation (NDPR), and due to its similarities with the GDPR, Peterside believes Okra has nothing to worry about — at least for now.

“In terms of what the law says, I think the fine print is clear not just in Nigeria but globally, so how we operate as a business is straightforward. But in terms of what we think, the regulators whether they make the necessary decisions… we can’t really speak about that but generally, the laws and global standards are clear,” he said.

If the company succeeds in keeping harmful regulations at bay, it can grow at whatever pace it wants. However, a bane that might threaten this pace is hiring, according to the CEO. “The one challenge I’ll say we face has to be hiring,” Ashiru Jituboh said.

Now, one of the significant reasons Okra proves attractive despite just over a year in operation is how it prioritizes speed. The company claims to onboard new clients in 24 hours or less while supporting them through the use cases specific to their product. 

An increasing clientele means increased problems which means more personnel to handle them. So besides using the recent check to expand its data infrastructure across Nigeria, Okra will put a sizeable chunk into sourcing for talent.

“We want to ensure that we’re solving our customers’ problems as fast as possible and give the clients the support they need. We want to make sure our hiring speed is the same as the speed of our growth and I think being able to raise capital is one of the solvers of that problem… making sure we’re bringing great talent and building a great team,” she added. 

Ashiru Jituboh understands the need for great engineering talent because of her engineering-heavy background. Before starting Okra with Peterside, she worked with JP Morgan, Fidelity Investments and Daimler Mercedes Benz. At Okra, she doubles as the chief executive and CTO, staking a claim as one of the most promising founders in Africa’s male-dominated fintech scene.

Omobola Johnson, a senior partner at TLcom Capital, maintains that these qualities and Okra’s proposition made the company its first fintech investment. It was more than enough to convince the firm to follow up in this round.

A year on, Okra has managed to make its investor list more impressive. Susa Ventures, its lead investor, has made notable early investments in Robinhood, Flexport and Fast. However, Okra is the only African-based startup the VC firm has invested in asides from Andela.

“We’re thrilled to partner with Okra as they enable developers across the African continent to transform digital financial services,” general partner at Susa, Seth Berman said. “We’re blown away by the quality of Okra’s team, pace of development and the excitement from the customers building on their API.”

As part of a Fortune Global 500 company, Accenture Ventures has invested in more than 30 startups. However, Okra is the first Black founded startup in its portfolio. Tom Lounibos, the firm’s president and managing director, said the reason behind the investment stems from partnering with Okra to bring open finance to Africa, the calibre of founders and their technology.

The founders tell me that Accenture and Susa represent smart money investors aligned with Okra’s vision and technology infrastructure play.

“For us, if we’re building an API infrastructure for the continent, we thought Accenture would be a really good partner because we’re essentially building an API which is a technology-based infrastructure.”

Besides, the investors will be pivotal to the company’s hiring and imminent pan-African expansion plans to Kenya and South Africa, where Okra is currently in beta.

Accenture coming onboard to Okra as an investor marks the latest in a line of major companies jumping in on the African fintech wave — Stripe with the acquisition of Paystack and Visa and WorldPay partnership with Flutterwave.

In terms of investments, Accenture Ventures continues the list of first-time U.S. investors in African fintech. Names like Bezos Expeditions in Chipper, Tiger Global and Avenir Growth Capital in Flutterwave and Valar in Kuda come to mind.

Beyond Susa and Accenture Ventures, Okra also brought on three angel investors to the round. Rob Solomon, chairman at GoFundMe and former partner at Accel; and two ex founding engineers at Robinhood — Arpan Shah and Hongxia Zhong.

Okra is not the only company looking to capitalize on the budding API financial infrastructure space. Stitch, another South African API fintech, came out of stealth with $4 million in funding. Pngme raised $3 million in February. Others like Nigeria’s Mono and OnePipe have raised six-figure pre-seed rounds and are backed by Y Combinator and Techstars.

Despite seeming competition, the infrastructure business, unlike a commoditized business, is one with room for many winners.

Facebook and its family of apps have long grappled with the issue of how to better manage — and eradicate — bullying and other harassment on its platform, turning both to algorithms and humans in its efforts to tackle the problem better. In the latest development, today, Instagram is announcing some new tools of its own.

First, it’s introducing a new way for people to further shield themselves from harassment in their direct messages, specifically in message requests by way of a new set of words, phrases and emojis that might signal abusive content, which will also include common misspellings of those key terms, sometimes used to try to evade the filters. Second, it’s giving users the ability to proactively block people even if they try to contact the user in question over a new account.

The blocking account feature is going live globally in the next few weeks, Instagram said, and it confirmed to me that the feature to filter out abusive DMs will start rolling out in the UK, France, Germany, Ireland, Canada, Australia and New Zealand in a few weeks’ time before becoming available in more countries over the next few months.

Notably, these features are only being rolled out on Instagram — not Messenger, and not WhatsApp, Facebook’s other two hugely popular apps that enable direct messaging. The spokesperson confirmed that Facebook hopes to bring it to other apps in the stable later this year. (Instagram and others have regularly issued updates on single apps before considering how to roll them out more widely.)

Instagram said that the feature to scan DMs for abusive content — which will be based on a list of words and emojis that Facebook compiles with the help of anti-discrimination and anti-bullying organizations (it did not specify which), along with terms and emoji’s that you might add in yourself — has to be turned on proactively, rather than being made available by default.

Why? More user license, it seems, and to keep conversations private if uses want them to be. “We want to respect peoples’ privacy and give people control over their experiences in a way that works best for them,” a spokesperson said, pointing out that this is similar to how its comment filters also work. It will live in Settings>Privacy>Hidden Words for those who will want to turn on the control.

There are a number of third-party services out there in the wild now building content moderation tools that sniff out harassment and hate speech — they include the likes of Sentropy and Hive — but what has been interesting is that the larger technology companies up to now have opted to build these tools themselves. That is also the case here, the company confirmed.

The system is completely automated, although Facebook noted that it reviews any content that gets reported. While it doesn’t keep data from those interactions, it confirmed that it will be using reported words to continue building its bigger database of terms that will trigger content getting blocked, and subsequently deleting, blocking and reporting the people who are sending it.

On the subject of those people, it’s been a long time coming that Facebook has started to get smarter on how it handles the fact that the people with really ill intent have wasted no time in building multiple accounts to pick up the slack when their primary profiles get blocked. People have been aggravated by this loophole for as long as DMs have been around, even though Facebook’s harassment policies had already prohibited people from repeatedly contacting someone who doesn’t want to hear from them, and the company had already also prohibited recidivism, which as Facebook describes it, means “if someone’s account is disabled for breaking our rules, we would remove any new accounts they create whenever we become aware of it.”

The company’s approach to Direct Messages has been something of a template for how other social media companies have built these out.

In essence, they are open-ended by default, with one inbox reserved for actual contacts, but a second one for anyone at all to contact you. While some people just ignore that second box altogether, the nature of how Instagram works and is built is for more, not less, contact with others, and that means people will use those second inboxes for their DMs more than they might, for example, delve into their spam inboxes in email.

The bigger issue continues to be a game of whack-a-mole, however, and one that not just its users are asking for more help to solve. As Facebook continues to find itself under the scrutinizing eye of regulators, harassment — and better management of it — has emerged as a very key area that it will be required to solve before others do the solving for it.

A week after the cryptocurrency exchange Coinbase staged a direct listing, much of the focus remains on the wealth that the listing generated for executives at the company, its board members, and its private investors. Citing data from Capital Market Laboratories, Cointelegraph on Monday noted, for example, that 12,965,079 shares worth close to $5 billion at the time had been sold by insiders by the close of stock market on Friday.

One early investor who sold some of those shares is Garry Tan of the venture firm Initialized Capital. Tan worked previously as a partner with Y Combinator, where he helped ensure that Coinbase was accepted into the program and he remained the primary contact for founder and CEO Brian Armstrong, backing Armstrong three more times with seed checks after launching Initialized Capital with two other YC alums: Alexis Ohanian and Harjeet Taggar. Before the listing, Initialized still owned .08% of Coinbase, which currently boasts a market cap of $64 billion.

We talked with Tan late last week, who spoke candidly about the event and its impact on him personally. Tan also gave a fairly specific reason why he’s holding on to the “vast majority” of his stake for the foreseeable future. You can hear our conversation here; you can also check out excerpts from that discussion below.

TC: What year was that when you wrote that first check to Coinbase [on behalf of Y Combinator]?

GT: It was 2012. I believe it would have been in April or May and then the batch started in June and I had just raised $7 million from Alex Bangash, who’s a great fund of funds operator. He does direct [investing] now, too. But he’d been trying to invest with Y Combinator for many years., and Jessica [Livingston] and Paul [Graham] said, ‘There’s probably not a way for you to do that. But here, you should meet Garry and Harj and Alexis, who are raising a very small $7 million fund.’ And he ended up giving us $5 million of the $7 million and Coinbase was one of our very first checks; we wrote a $50,000 check [with a] $9 million pre-money cap.

TC: Did that create any complications with Y Combinator, as Coinbase started to take off? Did Initalized up with a bigger stake in the company than Y Combinator?

GT: I think YC still ended up getting more. The other thing that was true back then was it was commonplace for YC partners to invest in YC companies. And it is true that we were quite successful. And we were asked to stop doing that, we did. And that’s when I helped raise YC Continuity. And once that got up and running in 2015, that’s when I decided to spin out.

I love YC. It was in super great shape. And it’s more fun to be a pirate than to join the Navy. So I jumped ship and worked on our third $125 million seed fund back in 2016. But [we’re] still close friends with all of our friends back at YC and I think super fondly of my time back there.

TC: A lot of numbers have been published about who owns much and how much it’s worth. If you detangle Initialized’s stake from YC’s, your stake [would be valued around] $800 million. Were you restricted in any way from selling?

GT: No.

TC: Nobody was?

GT: The company didn’t need to raise money. It’s a profitable company. That’s a super powerful thing to really know. This is not a speculative, cash-burning entity. This is a kind company with a durable moat and hyper profitability.

TC: Would you share what percentage of your stake you sold?

GT: I sold basically a fraction of my shares. As [with] many early employees, to be frank, this exit to me and my family is actually quite meaningful, just like it is for a lot of the other people who started off as engineers, I myself and an engineer [who] had credit card debt as recently as 2011 before I became an investor at Y Combinator and Initialized. We have to remember that Silicon Valley is where a lot of skilled builders are creating their own first wealth.

And all that being said, like a lot of other people who are also long with the company, I’m holding the majority and vast majority [of my shares] because I’m super long on both crypto and Coinbase.

TC: How do you think about its valuation and whether it’s sustainable? So much of the company’s revenue derives from transaction fees and invariably, competition is going to drive those down to potentially zero. Robinhood already offers commission-free trades on crypto [and is also expected to go pubic soon]. 

GT:  In the short term, you think about it as an exchange. In the long term, you need to think about it as what is: a trusted on-ramp and user experience, and then [there’s] also the infrastructure.

We were actually the first seed investors and largest institutional holder of stock in Bison Trails [a firm that specializes in building blockchain infrastructure for banks and other companies] and was bought by Coinbase late last year [though the deal was announced in January for undisclosed terms]. This is a company that I think a lot of people should pay attention to even now, because all of crypto is switching from proof of work — [an energy intensive process] that is how Bitcoin and Ethereum currently get to consensus — to [a new way of mining called] proof of stake, which is far more efficient and pretty much all of the newer blockchains are shifting to [and that rewards miners with transaction fees].

So this was a huge strategic buy for Coinbase and sets them up to be like a cloud infra company the way AWS is. And if you spend time with Amazon’s annual report, you realize that [infrastructure] is a massively profitable space. So that is the way to think about Coinbase.

TC: And Coinbase has customers of this cloud infrastructure service already.

GT: It’s already the preferred infra company for a great number of the top 100 new crypto blockchains.

Long term, Microsoft is not one revenue stream, it’s not a one trick pony. They started with an OS. They used their advantage in operating systems to build applications, and then OS and applications together allowed them to also build server software.

[The best] companies stack durable advantages in multiple industries, and they do it on the back of hiring the best software engineers, the best designers, and the best product people, and that is enabled by a being extremely profitable, and then being a great place to work. And that’s the same for Coinbase as it is for Google, Facebook, for Amazon — any of the big tech giants.

(Again, for more, you can check it out this chat in its entirety here.)

Restaurants rode a wave of usage of food delivery services like Deliveroo, Uber Eats and DoorDash in the last year, discovering new revenues and ways to connect with diners to offset the fact that in-person trade for many of them had disappeared overnight. But they also discovered something less appetizing: dealing with the mess of apps and hardware that they need to use to manage orders from their various services is a nightmare, worse than a deflated souffle or a botched Beef Wellington.

Today, a startup out of Belgium called Deliverect, which has built a platform to manage all of that through one seamless app, is today announcing a big round of funding.

Underscoring the demand for its technology and the bumper year it’s just had, the company has raised $65 million — funding that it will be using to expand its business. That will include the services and integrations that it provides with a wider range of physical point of sale terminals and third-party service providers, and targeting more customers — restaurants, dark kitchens and consumer goods companies building direct-to-consumer strategies — in a wider range of markets.

The funding is being co-led by DST and Redpoint Ventures, with OMERS, Newion, Smartfin and the founders also participating. It brings the total raised by Deliverect to $90 million, and while the valuation is currently not being disclosed, it comes on the heels of big growth. In the last year, the company processed some $1 billion across 30 million orders for its customers, with business growing almost 750% in the last year.

Customers number 10,000 and include the likes of chains like KFC and Pret a Manger, smaller restaurants like Dishoom (an Indian restaurant in London, for readers outside of London), a dark kitchen startup called Casper, and consumer goods giant Unilever.

For some further context on valuation, Toast, a company that provides similar SaaS out of the US, but also sells an all-in-one product that also includes the point-of-sale hardware, is reportedly working on an IPO right now that would value it at $20 billion.

Zhong Xu, the CEO who co-founded Deliverect with Jan Hollez (CTO), Jelte Vrijhoef (CIO), and Jerome Laredo (CRO), recalled in an interview that the idea for the company stretches back to a time when his dad, an Asian transplant to Belgium who had built a point of sale system that he sold to Chinese restaurants, had hoped that his son would take over the family business. He had the entrepreneurial itch, however, and also saw that the problem was bigger than just the range of businesses that his dad was targeting. (His dad is still in business, and they still talk, Xu confirmed.)

That first led Xu and Hollez, also friends outside of work, in 2010, to found POSiOS, which was the first iPad-based point of sale solution in Europe. That business four years later was acquired by Lightspeed, to spearhead its move into POS for restaurants just ahead of its IPO.

That wasn’t the end of the line for these two, though. “We saw that tens of thousands of customers were using our iPad system, but they were asking for something else. They wanted to remove all their tablets altogether,” Xu said.

What he is referring to is a pretty big issue for the typical ready-made food provider. Be it a restaurant, a chain, a dark kitchen or a food company itself, the market for taking and filling food orders is traditionally very fragmented. You will have one proprietary system that is used to manage orders in your restaurant itself, and another for orders that people call in to come pick up and takeaway, and a third for delivery orders taken via third-party platforms.

And that third can be more than one, depending on how many delivery networks your restaurant is using. All of these could feasibly require their own pieces of hardware, and these customers wanted that simplified down to one device alone.

“Just try to imagine being in a restaurant: there could be people there, others calling in, and between 5 and 10 tablets screaming for attention,” Hollez said in an interview. “It is just not possible to manage this.”

The solution that Deliverect, founded in 2018, has built essentially brings all of that into a single SaaS platform that manages all of these different channels in one place.

This gives the food provider a way of adequately monitoring and managing what stock is being used up and which dishes are subsequently off the menu, what orders are coming in and where and how to better manage that across their operations, and critically to update their customers on what they can actually order and how long it might take to fill that order out (a provider like Deliveroo will then also use that data to calculate how long it will take to not just make the order but to pick it up and get it to a customer). Deliverect also provides some analytics that can help its customers figure out how to manage all this better in the future.

While this state of affairs has been a problem for years, it definitely escalated in the last year, Xu said, with between 10% and 30% more orders coming from delivery platforms. The company claims that using its software helps its restaurant customers work significantly more efficiently, leading to an average increase of 25% in revenues and — importantly — an 80% decrease in order failures that resulted from all that chaotic fragmentation.

The work it’s doing with FMCG companies is also interesting: the idea here is that brands themselves have been in a bind that has only tightened in the last year, with usually only a very indirect relationship with customers: perhaps a strong bond in terms of marketing, but not when it comes to actually selling food items to customers: its sales typically involve intermediaries such as stores or restaurants.

But as the D2C trend has taken off in food, those big brands are leaving a lot on the table for competitors to pick up, and that’s even more of an issue when the restaurants and stores are being shut or just seeing less footfall due to Covid-19. So many of them have started to explore what they might do to bridge that gap. Xu said that by and large the focus at the moment is really about running marketing campaigns and getting physical items to people as a part of that, but it does present some very interesting ideas about how Deliverect might develop in the future.

For example, a new wave of ultra-fast grocery delivery startups are emerging, and those could represent a new wave of customers for the company and be a tool for helping the Unilevers of the world supply those platforms with steady streams of its products, or indeed the FMCG companies could leverage those to become direct sellers of their fizzy drinks, pretzels and chocolates (or whatever items they want to sell). Xu noted in fact that Spain’s Glovo, one of these startups, is already a partner.

All of this spells an interesting future, despite the many other companies also chasing the opportunity, one reason why these founders and this startup out of Ghent have been backed by these high-profile international investors.

“The explosive rise of online food delivery is forcing restaurants to change how they operate,” said Elliot Geidt, Managing Director, Redpoint Ventures, in a statement. “Zhong and the Deliverect team are building the tools and infrastructure to help restaurants thrive in a world where navigating online food delivery is a matter of success or failure. Zhong has a unique empathy for restaurant owners, an unmatched technical understanding of the food delivery tech stack, and a raw ambition and vision that leaves us very excited.”

“Restaurants, consumer goods companies and other businesses increasingly want to enable on-demand ordering by their customers,” added Tom Stafford, Managing Partner, DST Global Partners, in his own statement. “But many do not have the tools or technology to efficiently work with  on-demand delivery providers. Deliverect is providing key software and integrations to enable these businesses to integrate on-demand offerings seamlessly. We are excited to partner with the Deliverect team as they continue to roll out their technology globally and further develop their product offering.”

Robotic process automation has become buzzy in the last few months. New York-based UiPath is on course to launch an initial public offering after gaining an astounding valuation of $35 billion in February. Over in China, homegrown RPA startup Laiye is making waves as well.

Laiye, which develops software to mimic mundane workplace tasks like keyboard strokes and mouse clicks, announced it has raised $50 million in a Series C+ round. The proceeds came about a year after the Beijing-based company pulled in the first tranche of its Series C round.

Laiye, six years old and led by Baidu veterans, has raised over $130 million to date according to public information.

Leading investors in the Series C+ round were Ping An Global Voyager Fund, an early-stage strategic investment vehicle of Chinese financial conglomerate Ping An, and Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Industry Equity Investment Fund, a government-backed fund. Other participants included Lightspeed China Partners, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Sequoia China and Wu Capital.

RPA tools are attracting companies looking for ways to automate workflows during COVID-19, which has disrupted office collaboration. But the enterprise tech was already gaining traction prior to the pandemic. As my colleague, Ron Miller wrote this month on the heels of UiPath’s S1 filing:

“The category was gaining in popularity by that point because it addressed automation in a legacy context. That meant companies with deep legacy technology — practically everyone not born in the cloud — could automate across older platforms without ripping and replacing, an expensive and risky undertaking that most CEOs would rather not take.”

In one case, Laiye’s RPA software helped the social security workers in the city of Lanzhou speed up their account reconciliation process by 75%; in the past, they would have to type in pensioners’ information and check manually whether the details were correct.

In another instance, Laiye’s chatbot helped automate the national population census in several southern Chinese cities, freeing census takers from visiting households door-to-door.

Laiye said its RPA enterprise business achieved positive cash flow and its chatbot business turned profitability in the fourth quarter of 2020. Its free-to-use edition has amassed over 400,000 developers, and the company also runs a bot marketplace connecting freelance developers to small-time businesses with automation needs.

Laiye is expanding its services globally and boasts that its footprint now spams Asia, the United States and Europe.

“Laiye aims to foster the world’s largest developer community for software robots and built the world’s largest bot marketplace in the next three years, and we plan to certify at least one million software robot developers by 2025,” said Wang Guanchun, chair and CEO of Laiye.

“We believe that digital workforce and intelligent automation will reach all walks of life as long as more human workers can be up-skilled with knowledge in RPA and AI”.

Apple announces new devices, Amazon opens a hair salon and Venmo adds cryptocurrency support. This is your Daily Crunch for April 20, 2021.

The big story: Apple announces a new iPad Pro and much more

Apple revealed a bunch of new products at its press event today. As expected, there’s going to be a new iPad Pro that’s supposed to represent a 50% performance increase over the previous model, with pricing starting at $799 for an 11-inch model.

In addition, Apple announced a redesigned Podcast app with support for paid subscriptions, a new purple iPhone 12, its long-awaited AirTag devices for finding lost objects, a new Apple TV 4K with a new remote (you also can buy the remote separately) and colorful new iMacs with M1 chips.

The tech giants

Amazon is opening a London hair salon to test AR and other retail technologies — The salon will occupy over 1,500 sq. ft on Brushfield Street in London’s Spitalfields.

Venmo adds support for buying, holding and selling cryptocurrencies — This is similar to the support that Venmo’s parent company PayPal added late last year.

Netflix blames ‘lighter content slate’ for slowing subscriber growth — But the company said production has resumed “in every major market, with the exception of Brazil and India.”

Startups, funding and venture capital

Discord walked away from Microsoft talks, may pursue an IPO — Before Discord walked away, the talks valued the company at around $10 billion.

Clearbanc rebrands its way into a unicorn — The fintech company raised a $100 million Series C.

Tom Brady and Salesforce Ventures pour millions into Class, a Zoom-friendly edtech startup — The product integrates exclusively with Zoom to make remote teaching more elegant.

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

Who’s funding privacy tech? — New regulations, stricter cross-border data transfer rules and increasing calls for data sovereignty have helped the privacy startup space grow.

Insurtech startups are leveraging rapid growth to raise big money — Since the end of the first quarter, we’ve seen several players in the broad startup category announce new capital, including Clearcover, Alan, Next Insurance and The Zebra.

Deep Science: Introspective, detail-oriented and disaster-chasing AIs — Our latest research roundup.

(Extra Crunch is our membership program, which helps founders and startup teams get ahead. You can sign up here.)

Everything else

Cannabis banking act passes US House with bipartisan support — Couldn’t have happened on a better day!

Announcing our TC Sessions: SaaS virtual event happening October 27 — The single-day event will take place 100% virtually and will feature actionable advice, Q&A with some of SaaS’s biggest names and plenty of networking opportunities.

The Daily Crunch is TechCrunch’s roundup of our biggest and most important stories. If you’d like to get this delivered to your inbox every day at around 3pm Pacific, you can subscribe here.