Author: azeeadmin

The U.S. government has cut trade ties to Myanmar, two months after the country’s military staged a coup overthrowing the country’s president and also its de-facto leader, Aung San Suu Kyi, and killed at least 200 protesters resulting from its offensive.

In a statement, U.S. Trade Representative Katherine Tai said the trade suspension would be “effective immediately” and will remain in place “until the return of a democratically elected government.”

“The United States supports the people of Burma in their efforts to restore a democratically elected government, which has been the foundation of Burma’s economic growth and reform,” said Tai. “The United States strongly condemns the Burmese security forces’ brutal violence against civilians. The killing of peaceful protestors, students, workers, labor leaders, medics, and children has shocked the conscience of the international community. These actions are a direct assault on the country’s transition to democracy and the efforts of the Burmese people to achieve a peaceful and prosperous future,” the statement read.

Myanmar (also known as Burma) and the U.S. began trading in 2013 following the easing of U.S. sanctions a year earlier after elections saw Suu Kyi’s party win by a landslide.

The trade suspension is designed to target the ruling military junta, but leaves millions of internet users across Myanmar in uncertainty as U.S. cloud and internet companies wrangle with the U.S. government order, at a time where protesters are struggling to stay online amid government-ordered internet shutdowns across the country.

Myanmar already blocked Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram “until further notice.”

Sanctions are designed to prevent the shipping of goods, money and certain services to other countries. Companies operating in the U.S. have to follow U.S. sanctions or face heavy financial penalties. ZTE pleaded guilty in 2017 to violating U.S. sanctions against Iran by knowingly shipping products to the country, and agreed to pay a near-$1 billion fine.

But cloud companies fall into a gray area and have different interpretations of the rules. Quartz reported in 2016 that internet users across Syria, Cuba, and Iran — all subject to U.S. trade sanctions — couldn’t access sites hosted by IBM, because the U.S. cloud host blocked visitors from those countries from accessing its services. Rackspace and Linode, two other large cloud providers, do not block internet traffic to users in embargoed countries but instead prevented users from those countries from signing up for their service.

Myamnar has about 17 million internet users, some 30% of the wider population. A spokesperson for the Office of the U.S. Trade Representative did not immediately return a request for comment.

News that UK-based used car seller Cazoo intends to list in the United States via a SPAC is not surprising. After all, the SPAC boom we’ve seen in recent quarters means that there are a host of American blank-check companies in the market looking for deals — why would they stop at domestic borders?

But the Cazoo deal is not a surprise for other reasons as well. We’ve seen the value of related American company Carvana spike in recent years after its 2017 IPO, for example. And Carvana has shown the sort of gross-margin improvement that Cazoo intends to manage in the coming years, so there’s precedent for its sales model to show economic improvements over time..

The Exchange explores startups, markets and money. Read it every morning on Extra Crunch, or get The Exchange newsletter every Saturday.

But coming at the same time as a sunny investor deck detailing why the Cazoo-AJAX I deal is a good idea are a number of public-market trembles that could indicate uncertain risk tolerance among public investors. We can see this in the slack debut of several Chinese companies, as well as the downward pressure on the public offering for Deliveroo, a food-delivery platform.

Is the public market’s enthusiasm for tech listings slowing? If so, it would be bad news for companies that have announced SPAC-led debuts, firms like Latch that priced their combination during a particular market climate. One that won’t match well to a risk-off environment, if that’s where things head.

This morning, let’s parse the Cazoo deck briefly and then ask ourselves what the market tea leaves are telling us about investor appetite for risky shares.

Cazoo

After reading the Cazoo and Deliveroo news this morning, I have to ask if there’s something particularly British about companies ending in -oo. Let me know.

Regardless, the Cazoo investor deck for its SPAC deal is here. Follow along if you want. We’re starting on page 33, where the company discloses its 2020 results and forecasts the next several:

Via Cazoo’s investor deck.

Cazoo is picking up significant capital today by teaming up with a SPAC in the U.S. at a $7 billion valuation, but it’s the end of the line for another big European name in used-car sales. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Berlin-based Frontier Car Group, which builds used-car marketplaces with a focus on emerging markets, is shutting down its operations.

Its majority owner OLX Group, a division of Prosus (the tech holdings of Naspers that is now listed as a separate entity), said that it wants to refocus on more local operations in Latin America and Asia under its OLX Autos brand.

OLX took a controlling stake in Frontier as a result of an investment of about $400 million in late 2019, valuing Frontier at around $700 million at the time. There was no official announcement of the closure, but we saw the news in passing on Twitter, and Prosus spokesperson confirmed the details to TechCrunch in a statement.

“OLX Group can confirm the closure of the FCG Germany GmbH entity based in Berlin over the coming months,” said the spokesperson. “This entity represents a subset of the OLX Group workforce in Berlin – other OLX Group employees in Berlin were not impacted by this entity closure, and those operations are ongoing. This decision to close FCG Germany GmbH was not taken lightly. The decision reflects the evolution of the OLX Autos strategy to focus more strongly on the LatAm and Asia markets. In order to have our development teams closer to our customers, we will shift core product development operations to India, a key market for OLX Autos. OLX Group is committed to taking care of our people in such a difficult situation and has offered a financial runway beyond what is compulsory, to allow time and flexibility to find new roles. Effected employees are being encouraged to apply for open roles within our other entities.”

About 100 people are being impacted by the news, the company confirmed to us and it looks to be an immediate move. If you go to FCG’s site now, it automatically redirects to OLX.

Although it was founded and headquartered in Berlin, Frontier Car Group had always focused on emerging markets and taking the used-car marketplace model to those countries.

Inspired by Cazoo rival Auto1 — another Berlin-based used-car marketplace that went public via a listing in Germany in February and is now valued at $12.6 billion (likely an encouraging comparison for Cazoo investors) — Frontier founders Sujay Tyle, Peter Lindholm and André Kussmann thought they could take that model to less developed markets for a bigger opportunity.

“I fell in love with the Auto1 model,” Tyle told TechCrunch back in 2018. “I could see how it could be applied to emerging markets. Emerging markets represent nascency.” Tyle himself is a whizz-kid who hails from the U.S. and was in his early 20s when he co-founded Frontier. He left it in August 2020 and now lives in Mexico City, building a new e-commerce investor there called Merama.

Frontier, in part because of the success of Auto1 (which took hundreds of millions of dollars in investment from the likes of Sequoia, SoftBank and others), became a part of the guard of exciting new tech startups building businesses out of Berlin.

That focus on emerging markets linked up Naspers’ global expansion strategy, and so OLX, a classifieds operation that had an interest in automotive marketplaces, became a strategic investor in Frontier, first with a smaller stake, and eventually taking majority ownership and control of the operation.

It’s not clear why OLX decided to wind down the Frontier brand and to double down OLX Autos but notably, over the last year it looks like OLX was restructuring in other markets, including with the layoff of 250 people in its operations in India after shutting down marketplaces focused on real estate and used goods.

While some companies like Cazoo have apparently seen a strong surge of business in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the health crisis has hit a number of economies, economic sectors and specific companies harder than others, leading to tightening costs. Overall, we’ve seen big slumps in new car sales in different markets around the world.

A Prosus spokesperson said that both OLX and OLX Autos were impacted at the start of Covid-19 but have since recovered. Prosus has remained profitable in what has been a turbulent year, but some have pointed out that those profits have declined. (It will next update its financials in June.)

Hello and welcome back to Equity, TechCrunch’s venture capital-focused podcast where we unpack the numbers behind the headlines.

This is Equity Monday, our weekly kickoff that tracks the latest private market news, talks about the coming week, digs into some recent funding rounds and mulls over a larger theme or narrative from the private markets. You can follow the show on Twitter here and myself here.

This morning was a fun mix of news, including some early-stage and late-stage startups entries, along with the latest from the public markets and the great IPO game. Here’s the rundown:

• ServiceTitan’s vertical SaaS success was enshrined in its recent funding round and valuation. Both of which were predicated on its revenue growth. The software market is just gigantic. It’s kinda crazy.
• Deliveroo’s IPO has hit market chop as it looks to price. Governance and how it treats workers were among the concerns that investors have raised.
• And then Chinese company BiliBili struggled during its Hong Kong IPO, while Chinese company Zhihu fell after debuting in the United States — could the public markets bet ratcheting back their interest in tech stocks?
• On the funding round side of things, Ajaib extended its Series A, Singular announced its fund, and Cazoo is going public via a SPAC.

It was a lot, but when have we started the week anything less than fully behind? Chat Wednesday!

Equity drops every Monday at 7:00 a.m. PST, Wednesday, and Friday at 6:00 AM PST, so subscribe to us on Apple Podcasts, Overcast, Spotify and all the casts!

IBM today announced the launch of its first developer certification for programming quantum computers.

While quantum computing may still be in its infancy, most pundits in the industry will tell you that now is the time to learn the basic concepts. And while there is little that’s immediately intuitive on the hardware side of quantum computing, the actual software tools that most players in the industry are developing today should feel somewhat familiar to virtually any developer.

Unsurprisingly, the ‘IBM Quantum Developer Certification,’ as it’s officially called, focuses on IBM’s own software tools and especially Qiskit, its SDK for working with quantum computers. Qiskit has already proven quite popular, with more than 600,000 installs and when IBM Quantum and the Qiskit team hosted a quantum summer school last year, almost 5,000 developers participated.

But on top of knowing their way around the basics of Qiskit (think defining and executing quantum circuits) developers also need to learn some of the basics of quantum computing itself. Once you know your way around Bloch spheres, Pauli matrices and Bell states, you’ll probably be in good shape for taking the certification exam, which will be administered on the Pearson VUE platform.

Abe Asfaw, the global lead for Quantum Education and Open Science at IBM, told me that this is just the first of a series of planned quantum certifications.

“What we’ve built is a multi-tiered developer certification,” he told me. “The first tier is what we’re releasing in this announcement and that tier gets developers introduced to how to work with quantum circuits. How do you use Qiskit […] and how do you run it on a quantum computer? And once you run it on a quantum computer, how do you look at the results and how do you interpret the results? This sets the stage for the next series of certifications that we’re developing, which are then going to be attached to use cases that are being explored in optimization, chemistry and finance. All of these can now be sort of integrated into the developer workflow once we have enabled someone to show that they can work with quantum circuits.”

Image Credits: IBM

Asfaw stressed that IBM has focused on education developers about quantum computing for quite a while now, in part because it takes some time to develop the skills and intuition to build quantum circuits. He also noted that the open-source Qiskit project has integrated a lot of the tools that developers need to work at both the circuit level — which is a bit closer to writing in C or maybe even assembly in the classical computing world — and at the application level, where a lot of that is abstracted away.

“The idea is to make it easy for someone who is currently developing, whether it’s in the cloud, whether it’s using Python, to be able to run these tools and integrate quantum computing into their workflow,” Asfaw said. “I think the hardest part, to be very honest, is just giving someone the comfort to know that quantum computing is real today and that you can work with quantum computers. It’s as easy as opening up a Jupyter notebook and writing some code in Python.”

The Station is a weekly newsletter dedicated to all things transportation. Sign up here — just click The Station — to receive it every weekend in your inbox.

Hi friends and new readers, welcome to The Station. A few items before we jump into the news.

Rebecca Bellan, who started writing for TechCrunch earlier this month, is going to be contributing to the micromobbin’ section as part of her focus on ebikes, scooters and other personal mobility vehicles. Reach out to her at rebecca.techcrunch@gmail.com if you want to share some micro news or offer up a tip.

Last week, I promised a new market maps article — those deep dives into slices of the transportation sector. The latest, written by Abigail Bassett, examines the business of augmented and virtual reality in vehicles. This is an Extra Crunch story, which requires a subscription.

As I’ve shared in here before, we’re bringing more transportation analysis to Extra Crunch. So far, we’ve had Mark Harris’ article on solid state batteries and Jason Plautz’s piece on the business of MaaS transit. This coming week we’ll have analysis on the market for second-life batteries.

Of course, my email inbox is always open. Email me at kirsten.korosec@techcrunch.com to share thoughts, criticisms, offer up opinions or tips. You can also send a direct message to me at Twitter — @kirstenkorosec.

Micromobbin’

Lime rolled out several new app features designed to get more people riding their ever-growing fleet of e-scooters. The micromobility company will make e-scooter rides available to new users who don’t have the app and aren’t particularly fussed to download it — whether it’s for personal reasons, commitment issues or lack of phone space. Instead, customers can just scan the QR code on the scooter and let Apple’s App Clips or Android’s Instant App do the work of payment. Lime says they’re already seeing impressive conversion rates for new riders coming to the scooters slowly through this coy method.

Lime also decided to do away with the fee for reserving vehicles for up to 10 minutes, a cost that developers say was not only unnecessary, but also restrictive — apparently, during tests, the percentage of people who used the reservation feature increased once the price dropped. And to make it just that much more convenient to hop off the subway and step onto a scooter, the Lime app will also highlight a path to the rider’s nearest scooter. Finally, riders now you can go into dark mode on the app if they feel like it. Lime says this makes viewing the app at night easier on the eyes. And besides, all the other apps are doing it!

Some other micromobility tidbits …

British Columbia has approved e-scooter pilot projects in four cities within Metro Vancouver, as well as Kelowna and Vernon. Municipal governments put a call out for interested local jurisdictions last year, and these localities were among those who raised their hands. It’s still not clear which companies will be dropping their dockless e-scooters on the Canadian streets, but something tells me we’ll see many of the usual players.

In other policy-related news, Washington state is thinking about installing an e-bike tax break. A state Senate committee will be holding a hearing this week on a bill that would make e-bikes exempt from the state’s 6.5% sales tax.

— Rebecca Bellan

Deal of the week

TuSimple filed an IPO, putting to rest months of speculation that the autonomous vehicle startup was going to take the trendy route to the public exchanges and merge with a special purpose acquisition company. The company did not SPAC, but instead took the traditional IPO route.

TuSimple’s S-1 is a page turner. I’ll list a few of the items that popped out.

1. TuSimple’s shares are largely held by Chinese investors. The company’s principal stockholders of Class A shares are Sun Dream Inc with 20%, Composite Capital Master Fund with 7.28% and Navistar with 6%. Navistar is now owned by Volkswagen Group’s The Traton Group. TuSimple’s co-founders Mo Chen and Xiaodi Hou hold 9.1% and 8.5%, respectively in Class A shares. The two each hold 50% of the Class B shares.

The Sun Dream is ultimately controlled by Charles Chao, who is a board member, but perhaps best known as the chairman of Sina, which owns Weibo.

While TuSimple has a large U.S. presence and a number of partnerships with U.S. companies, there’s no denying its Chinese ties.

2. At least one of TuSimple’s investors has caught the attention of the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States. TuSimple reveals in its S-1 that CFIUS is reviewing shares held by Sun Dream, which as I mentioned above is an affiliate of Sina Corporation. CFIUS will have 45 days to conduct a review of the Investment.

3. The S-1 shows that TuSimple had a loss from operations of $177.9 million in 2020, more than double loss of $84.8 million incurred in the previous year. The company said it had net losses from operations of $45 million in 2018. Its accumulated deficit was $405.2 million as of December 31, 2020.

Net loss attributable to common stockholders sat at $198.8 million in 2020, up from a loss of $145 million a year earlier. The company’s revenue did rise to $1.8 million in 2020, up from $710,000 the previous year.

The upshot: TuSimple has lost more than $307 million in the past three years, a figure that illustrates the kind of capital that the larger, well funded autonomous vehicle companies are pouring through to try and commercialize the technology.

It makes me more confident than ever that other AV companies like Aurora will soon file to go public as well, either via the traditional path or through a SPAC merger.

Other deals that got my attention this week …

Automotus, a curb management startup that uses video analytics, raised $1.2 million in a seed round last month led by Quake Capital, Techstars Ventures, Kevin Uhlenhaker (the co-founder & CEO at NuPark, which was acquired by Passport) and Baron Davis. More investors, including Ben Bear, Derrick Ko, and Zaizhuang Cheng of micromobility company Spin, have piled on bringing its total raise to $2.3 million, CEO Jordan Justus told TechCrunch.

Baraja, Australian lidar maker, raised a $31 million in a Series B round led by Blackbird Ventures. Main Sequence Ventures, Hitachi Construction Machinery, Regal Funds Management, Perennial Value Management and InterValley Ventures also joined the round.

The company said the funds will be used to continue the deployment and development of its “unique and ingenious” imaging system. As Devin Coldewey explains in his article, Baraja’s lidar uses what the company calls Spectrum-Scan, letting physics do the hard work of directing the light. By passing its laser through a prism, different wavelengths of light go in different directions — and when it comes back, it takes the same path. Check his coverage of the company from CES last year, which lays it out in more detail.

Baton, a San Francisco-based startup that wants to set up drop zones for long-haul trucking companies, raised $10.5 million in the Series A in a Series A funding round, co-led by 8VC and Maersk Growth, the corporate venture arm of logistics giant AP Moller-Maersk. The now has a post-money valuation of $50 million, co-founders Nate Robert and Andrew Berberick told TechCrunch.

Prologis, Ryder, Lineage Logistics, Project44 CEO Jett McCandless, KeepTruckin’ CEO Shoaib Makani, Clarendon Capital operating partner John Larkin, I.S.G founder Trace Haggard and Cooley LLC all participated in the round.

Blacklane, the Berlin startup that provides on-demand black-car chauffeur service, closed a round of €22 million ($26 million at current rates). Blacklane, which took a majority stake in Havn in February, said that it will be using this latest round of funding to continue expanding sustainable travel initiatives, and to continue expanding its existing business with more flexible options for riding.

Flapper, an on-demand private aviation company based in Brazil, raised $2 million in a Series A round led by the aerospace-focused fund, Confrapar. Crowdfunding platform SMU and angel investor group Investidores.VC also participated along with a number of foreign and local investors, including three undisclosed air taxi companies. The company has previously raised $1 million Seed funding, led by Confrapar and ACE, Brazil’s largest accelerator.

Gorillas, the Berlin-based grocery delivery startup, raised $290 million in Series B funding, at a valuation that surpasses $1 billion. The round was led by Coatue Management, DST Global and Tencent, with participation from Green Oaks, Fifth Wall and Dragoneer. Previous backer Atlantic Food Labs also followed on.

Hoppin, the Canadian travel startup Hopper, raised a $170 million in a Series F round led by Capital One. The U.S. banks and credit card company is also coming on board as a strategic partner, to launch Capital One Travel, which is the first instantiation of Hopper’s new B2B platform, Hopper Cloud.

Woven Capital, the investment arm of Toyota’s innovation-focused subsidiary Woven Planet, kicked off its new $800 million strategic fund with an investment in autonomous delivery startup Nuro. Neither company shared the amount of the investment. We do know that Woven Capital’s contribution was part of Nuro’s $500 million Series C funding round, which was announced last November. Chipotle also invested in the round, which also included funds managed by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc., with participation from new investors Fidelity Management & Research Company, LLC and Baillie Gifford.

Notable news and other tidbits

Whew, the newsletter is a bit long already, so I’ll just mention a few other items worth noting this week.

Autonomous vehicles

Cruise, autonomous vehicle subsidiary of GM, seems to be trying to appeal to the youths by creating an influencer-esque personality out of one of its vehicles. “Poppy,” who identifies with she/her pronouns according to her Twitter bio, debuted her first post Wednesday, sharing a TikTok video that shows her riding around the streets of San Francisco. Cruise began testing its self-driving car on the Bay Area streets in December.

Plus will be part of a pilot project with SF Express that aims to demonstrate how trucks with an automated driving system can improve logistics operations. Plus is running its supervised autonomous trucks on two long-haul routes in China.

Yandex published a blog post with details on how its autonomous vehicles development in Russia. The company said it recently passed 6 million miles of testing, with one-third of that mileage driven in Russian winter conditions. The blog describes how it uses neural networks to filter snow out of the lidar point cloud and handle condensation clouds created by car exhausts and heating vents, among other challenges.

Electric

BMW Group and California utility Pacific Gas & Electric are rolling out the next phase of a pilot that aims to test — and learn — how electric vehicles could support the integration of renewable energy on the electric grid.

Electric vehicle manufacturers are pushing back against a decision by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration to delay penalty increases for automakers who fail to meet fuel efficiency standards.  Tesla has taken the most active role and petitioned the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals to review the ruling, saying that the delay “inflicts ongoing, irreparable injury” on the company and creates an “uneven playing field” by reducing the consequences of nonadherence.

Geely Automobile Holdings is launching a new brand of premium electric vehicles called Zeekr. The vehicles will be manufactured by parent company Zhejiang Geely Holding Group. The first Zeekr vehicles are expected to be delivered in the third quarter of 2021.

Jeep has partnered with Electrify America to create the Jeep 4xe Charging Network. Jeep-branded EV charging stations will be installed at or near the trailheads of Jeep Badge of Honor off-road trails over the next year. Jeep 4xe charging stations are scheduled to open this spring at three of the most-popular off-road sites and icons for the Jeep brand: Moab, Utah as well as the Rubicon Trail and Big Bear, both of which are in California. (Sorta reminds me of the Rivian adventure network).

Rivian has been sued by Illinois car dealers over its direct-to-consumer sales model.

Tesla is now accepting bitcoin (at least for customers in the U.S.).

Ride-hailing and sharing

Uber is being challenged in the U.K for using facial recognition technology for a driver identity system. The App Drivers & Couriers Union and the Worker Info Exchange have called for Microsoft to suspend the ride-hailing giant’s use of B2B facial recognition after finding multiple cases where drivers were mis-identified and went on to have their license to operate revoked by Transport for London.

Via partnered with southeast Michigan’s public transit authority (known as SMART) to launch an on-demand public transit service in the Detroit Metro area. The on-demand public transit service, called SMART Flex, will act as a complement and extension to the existing transit system in the area.

“There is no doubt that over time, people are going to rely less and less on passwords… they just don’t meet the challenge for anything you really want to secure,” said Bill Gates.

That was seventeen years ago. Although passwords have lost some of their charm, they have so far survived many attempts to kill them for good.

The perception of high cost and tricky implementations has stalled some smaller businesses from ditching passwords. But alternatives to passwords are affordable, easy to implement, and safer, show industry insights gathered by Extra Crunch. The move to zero trust systems is acting as a catalyst.

First, a primer. Zero trust focuses on who you are, not where you are. Zero trust models require companies to never trust any attempt to access its network, and must verify every single time — even from logins from inside the network. Passwordless tech is a key part of zero trust models.

There are several alternatives for passwords, including:

• Biometric authentication: widely used as fingerprint readers in smartphones and physical verification points at buildings;
• Social media authentication: where you use your Google or Facebook IDs to authenticate you with a third-party service;
• Multi-factor authentication: where more layers of authentication are added using devices or services, such as token authentication using a trusted device.
• Grid authentication cards: which provides access while using a combination PIN number.
• Push notifications: which are usually sent to the user’s smartphones or encrypted devices.
• Digital certificates: cryptographic files stored locally on the machine or device.

Wolt, a Finnish food-delivery site is just one example of going passwordless.

“The user registers by entering their email address or a phone number. Login to the app takes place by clicking the temporary link in the user’s inbox. The app on the user’s mobile phone places an authentication cookie, which enables the user to continue from that device without having to go through any further authentication,” said Erka Koivunen, CISO at F-Secure.

In this case, the service provider is in full control of the authentication, allowing it to set expiration time, revoke service, and detect fraud. The service provider does not need to count on the user’s commitment to keep track of their passwords.

Passwordless tech is not inherently costly but may take some adjustment, explained Ryan Weeks, CISO at managed service provider Datto.

“It is not necessarily costly in terms of monetary investment, because there are a lot of easily accessible open-source alternatives for multi factor authentication that don’t require any sort of investment,” said Weeks. But some companies believe passwordless tech may cause friction to their employees’ productivity.

Koivunen also dismissed that zero trust models are unaffordable for startups.

“Zero trust recognises the futility of forcing users to authenticate themselves by presenting something they should keep as secret. Instead, it prefers to establish the user’s identity using some context-aware method,” he said.

Zero trust goes further than authenticating users; it also includes the device and the user.

“From a zero trust perspective, there is an idea that there is a continuous authentication or revalidation of trust occurring. Therefore, passwordless in a zero trust model is potentially easier for the user and more secure as the combination of the ‘something you have’ and ‘something you are’ factors are more difficult to attack,” said Datto’s Weeks.

Larger companies, like Microsoft and Google, already offer zero trust technologies. But investors are also eyeing smaller companies that offer zero trust for growing companies.

Axis Security, a zero trust provider that allows remote employees to access their company’s network, raised $32 million last year. Beyond Identity raised $75 million in funding in December. And, Israel identity validation startup Identiq raised $47 million in Series A funding in March.

Chinese ride-hailing company, DiDi Chuxing has started operations in South Africa today according to Reuters.

Founded in 2012, the Beijing based company operates in more than 400 cities in China. It claims to serve over 550 million users in 16 countries across Asia, Europe, Latin America, and Australia.

This South African expansion (first launch in Cape Town) marks its first presence in Africa and 17th active country.

Here’s an excerpt from the company’s website announcing the launch.

“DiDi South Africa understands the challenges communities and the transportation industry face with the evolution of urban mobility (rideshare) and as a result is committed to creating the freedom and convenience to go places, open up horizons and give access to new experiences through our platforms.

Our mission is driven by a dedicated team, who understand the operational landscapes of the rideshare industry. DiDi exists to help South Africans move freely and to unlock their potential and that of the cities they live in.”

Although the nine-year-old company claims to understand how the ride-sharing industry works, the South African market despite being a relatively stable environment with high economic potential compared to the rest of Africa, is a different ball game entirely.

While Uber and Bolt are dominant with not more than two million users, they regularly face regulatory challenges from the government who feel the need to protect traditional metered taxis in the country. DiDi wouldn’t be exempt from this but the timing to expand to South Africa suggests the company is looking to explore the present challenges facing Uber as its drivers push for worker rights.

After Uber announced that it will concede employment rights to its UK drivers, SA drivers are trying to get the same decision in their favor by filing a class-action suit in collaboration with British law firm Leigh Day and Johannesburg-based Mbuyisa Moleele Attorneys.

That said, with South Africa, DiDi now currently has interests either by expansion or investments all over the world.

In 2018, DiDi acquired Brazilian ride-hailing company 99 and now claims to have 50% of the ride-hailing market share in South America. In its most dominant market, China, DiDi has almost 80% market share after buying out Uber China in 2016.

The company whose backers include Alibaba, Apple, DST, Softbank and Tencent also has its claws in different ride-hailing companies in markets where it doesn’t operate — Grab (Southeast Asia), Lyft (U.S.), and Ola (India). All these companies compete with Uber in their respective markets.

But having invested in Bolt as well, South Africa represents the second market after Russia where DiDi will be going head to head with the Estonian-based company. The pair will also compete with each other when DiDi begins operations in the U.K. as reported by Bloomberg in February.

These plans are geared towards increasing the value of the Softbank-backed company (currently valued at $62 billion) for a potential mega-IPO of $100 billion later this year.

Boston Dynamics’ transition from a decades-long research robotics firm to a company that productizes and sells hardware has been a fascinating one to watch. There have been some tough lessons along the way, including the very real lesson that at the end of the day, most robots in the world will be deployed for mundane tasks.

Sure, the company will continue to court the public with fun viral videos of its technology dancing to the oldies, but when it comes to actually selling robotics, the targets continue to be the dull, dirty and dangerous jobs we humans just don’t want to do. Or, as I’ve been putting it for a while now, robotics are — more often than not — cool technology performing decidedly uncool tasks.

Spot has found most of its success as an inspection robot. The quadruped has been deployed to oil rigs, nuclear plants and other places where most people would rather limit their time, given a choice. That takes care of the dangerous part of the three Ds, and you could make a reasonable argument that the company’s second commercially available robot is going after the dull bit.

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

I’m guessing you don’t need me to cite a bunch of statistics about how massive an industry shipping and logistics is. And with so many orders moving online, things are only growing. There’s a reason, after all, so many robotics companies — including Locus, Fetch and Berkshire Grey — are devoting their entire operation to this sort of automation. As the CEO of Locus told me recently, everyone is looking for the technology that will help them compete with Amazon and its massive robotics army.

Stretch (currently a prototype) is the long-promised commercial version of Handle, a robot the company introduced via viral YouTube video a little over four years ago. In its earliest form, the wheeled robot was an extremely versatile robot with an impressive ability to maintain balance while gliding and taking on different obstacles. The robot also picked up a 100-pound crate. Little did we realize at the time that would become the foundational element of its future evolution.

In fact, Handle’s box lifting dates back even further, to a video featuring the company’s humanoid robot, Atlas. “We showed some box moving, among other things. And it got a lot of interest from people in warehouses,” Boston Dynamics VP of Product Engineering Kevin Blankespoor tells TechCrunch. “They actually wanted Atlas to come work for them. We really thought we could design a much more simple robot that could tackle a warehouse task. There’s where Handle was born. It really split off of the Atlas project at that point.”

Blankespoor says Handle was born out of the company’s long-standing desire to combine wheels with legs, forming the basis of some early experimentation with designing a robot that could help move objects in a warehouse setting.

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

“We started experimenting with customers with Handle in warehouses. He did a couple of different tasks. The first was unloading pallets, which was pretty good. The second application was unloading trucks. Handle could do that, but it did it pretty slowly. It’s a tight space, it had to maneuver a lot and it was too slow.”

A 2019 video titled, “Handle Robot Reimagined for Logistics,” shows the wheeled robot outfitted with a large top-mounted arm and a gripper comprised of a series of suction cups. In the video, a pair of robots work in tandem, moving boxes from one pallet to another. But images of Stretch showcase how dramatically Boston Dynamics has rethought the robot in order to make it commercially viable.

Most immediately apparent is the loss of Handle’s two large wheels. In their place is a large black platform. “The mobile base is in the bottom,” Blankespoor says. “It is designed to be the size of a pallet, so it can maneuver wherever a pallet can in the warehouse.”

The unit still has wheels, though they’re far less prominent. The two wheels are now four, hidden under the corners of the base. They move in any direction, allowing for a broad range of movement and relatively tight turns for a robot of its size. Also included is a “perception mast” to the side of the arm, effectively serving as the unit’s eyes for autonomous movement and picking.

Image Credits: Boston Dynamics

The robot was designed by Boston Dynamics’ warehouse division — now numbering around 100 people. That includes those employees the company picked up as part of its Kinema Systems acquisition, back in 2019. The San Francisco-based company’s 3D vision technology has been incorporated here, as well, to improve Stretch’s picking.

Early applications include truck unloading and order building (effectively combining goods onto a single pallet). Future applications include truck loading, as well, though this is still early stages for the tech. The nature of the system is more plug and play than ground-up automation from companies like Berkshire-Grey. The company is also working to make it compatible with other warehouse systems.

Boston Dynamics plans to build the first units over the summer and will make Stretch available for sale next year. The company’s not ready to talk pricing yet, but Blankespoor says it will be “comparable to a traditional robotic system that you see in factories where you have the robot bolted to the floor.”

Meet Singular, a new VC firm based in Paris that just finished raising its initial fund. The firm was founded by two former Alven partners — Raffi Kamber and Jérémy Uzan. They have some ambitious goals and an interesting investment model that could help them remain involved even during late-stage rounds. Overall, the firm raised €225 million, or $265 million at today’s exchange rate.

If you browse Singular’s website, you’re not going to find a lot of information. Here’s what it currently looks like:

Image Credits: Singular

The Singular team doesn’t want to be secretive. But they don’t like talking about themselves. That’s why you may have seen Singular’s name in a few articles I wrote over the past few months. But now it’s time to talk a bit about what the firm has in mind when it comes to startup investment.

Jérémy Uzan and Raffi Kamber spent 11 and 8 years at Alven. They’ve been behind some of the firm’s most successful investments, such as Dataiku and OpenClassrooms. “But every time you raise another fund, you sign up for a long time,” Uzan told me.

The duo left Alven quite naturally as they felt it was time in their careers to take their destiny in their own hands. There’s no hard feeling with their previous fund.

It was the right timing personally but also the right timing for the tech ecosystem. While Singular is based in Paris, the firm plans to build a true European VC firm with its headquarters in Paris. Singular wants to be Index Ventures, except that it doesn’t think London should be the center of gravity for European tech investment.

Singular started fundraising in late 2019 and early 2020. Kamber and Uzan didn’t know anything about raising a fund and didn’t work with an external financial firm to handle the fundraising effort.

When asked about the coronavirus pandemic and the impact on the process, they both said that the lockdown actually helped as everyone was stuck at home. Around two-thirds of the limited partners that invested in Singular are based outside of France.

“These are historic VC investors. They really believe in tech — and Europe too. They have seen that Europe has been taking off for the past two or three years,” Kamber told me.

Just like a startup, Singular wanted to be backed by some well-known investors. And some of those investors are injecting money in a French VC fund for the first time. Limited partners include a mix of pension funds, funds of funds, sovereign funds and family offices.

Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, Bpifrance, Vintage Investment Partners, Axa Venture Partners, Sofina, MACSF and Mubadala Capital are some of Singular’s backers. Unless you’ve raised a VC fund in the past, you may discover some of those names for the first time. And yet, these investors are significant. For instance, while you might not be familiar with the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan, they have over $200 billion in net assets.

Singular started closing investment deals around October 2020. So far, the company has invested in six different startups:

• A Series B round in Gtmhub, an OKR management service
• A Series B round in Indy, an accounting automation software suite
• A Series A round in Soda, an enterprise-grade data monitoring platform
• A seed round in Moka.care, a mental health solution for employees
• A seed round in Resilience, a full-stack software approach to improve cancer treatment
• Another undisclosed Series A round

It’s hard to find some common trends around this list of investments, but I’m going to help you. First, let’s start with the average check size.

“We are mostly focused on Series A/B because we think there’s a lot of room to grow at that stage,” Kamber said. And Singular can invest as much as €20 million in a single round ($23.6 million at today’s exchange rate).

When it comes to verticals, Singular openly says that it doesn’t want to focus on a specific area in particular. “We are a generalist fund and we are quite opportunistic,” Uzan said. Singular doesn’t want to choose between B2B and consumer, between AI and e-commerce, etc.

Where Singular stands out is that it has a unique approach to late-stage rounds. When a portfolio company reaches the Series C or Series D stage, Singular might not have enough money under management for infinite follow-on investments.

The VC firm didn’t want to raise its own late-stage fund. So Singular will be able to structure special-purpose investment vehicles with its limited partners. A few limited partners could put some money in this investment vehicle directly and the startup could accept to raise a new round with this new investment vehicle instead of a late-stage fund.

This way, Singular remains very much involved with the portfolio company in question. It could keep a board seat and have a say when it comes to the startup’s next phases.

It’s still too early to see how it would work in real life and it’s going to happen on a case-by-case basis. But the fact that Singular can offer that kind of investments is significant — it could be appealing for some entrepreneurs. You don’t have to accept it and you’re not tied with Singular forever, but the offer is on the table.

So that’s Singular — Eva Mayoud, Alexandre Flamant and Sonia Pélisson also joined the team. It’s not that often that a French VC firm starts from zero and raises a €225 million fund in a year. It’s going to be interesting to track the firm’s upcoming investments. In the meantime, here’s some TechCrunch coverage of Singular’s past deals: