Author: azeeadmin

Plant-based meat replacements have commanded a huge amount of investor and consumer attention in the decade or more since new entrants like Beyond Meat first burst onto the scene.

These companies have raised billions of dollars and the industry is now worth at least $20 billion as companies try to bring all the meaty taste of… um… meat… without all of the nasty environmental damage… to supermarket aisles and restaurants around the world.

Switching to a plant-based diet is probably the single most meaningful contribution a person can make to reducing their personal greenhouse gas emissions (without buying an electric vehicle or throwing solar panels on their roof).

The problem that continues to bedevil the industry is that there remains a pretty big chasm between the taste of these meat replacements and actual meat, no matter how many advancements startups notch in making better proteins or new additives like Impossible Foods’ heme. Today, meat replacement companies depend on palm oil and coconut oil for their fats — both inputs that come with their own set of environmental issues.

Enter Nourish Ingredients, which is focusing not on the proteins, but the fats that make tasty meats tasty. Consumers can’t have delicious, delicious bacon without fat, and they can’t have a marvelously marbled steak replacements without it either.

The Canberra, Australia-based company has raised $11 million from Horizons Ventures, the firm backed by Hong Kong billionaire Li Ka-shing (also a backer of Impossible Foods), and Main Sequence Ventures, an investment firm founded by Australia’s national science agency, the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation.

That organization is actually where the company’s two co-founders James Petrie and Ben Leita met back in 2013 while working as scientists. Petrie, a specialist in crop development, was spearheading the development of omega-3 canola oil, while Leita had a background in chemistry and bioplastics.  

The two had previously worked on a company that was trying to increase oil production in plants, something that the CSRO had been particularly interested in circa 2017. As the market for alternative meats really began to take off, the two entrepreneurs turned their attention to trying to make corollaries for animal fats.

“When we were talking to people we realized that these alternative food space was going to need these animal fat like plants,” said Leita. “We could use that skillset for fish oil and out of canola oil.”

Nourish’s innovation was in moving from plants to bacteria. “With the iteration speeds, it feels kind of like we’re cheating,” said Petrie. “You can get the cost of goods pretty damn low.”

Nourish Ingredients uses bacteria or organisms that make significant amounts of triglycerides and lipids. “Examples include Yarrowia. There are examples of that being used for production of tailored oils,” said Petrie. “We can tune these oleaginous organisms to make these animal fats that give us that great taste and experience.”

As both men noted, fats are really important for flavor. They’re a key differentiator in what makes different meats taste different, they said.

“The cow makes cow fat because that’s what the cow does, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s the best fat for a plant protein,” said Petrie. “We start out with a mimetic. No reason for us to be locked by the original organism. We’re trying to create new experiences. There are new experiences out there to be had.”

The company already counts several customers in both the plant and recombinant protein production space. Now, with 18 employees, the company is producing both genetically modified and non-CRISPR cultivated optimized fats. 

Other startups and established businesses also have technologies that could allow them to enter this new market. Those would be businesses like Geltor, which is currently focused on collagen, or Solazyme, which makes a range of bio-based specialty oils and chemicals.

“As active investors in the alternative protein space, we realize that animal-free fats that replicate the taste of traditional meat, poultry and seafood products are the next breakthrough in the industry,” said Phil Morle, partner at Main Sequence Ventures. “Nourish have discovered how to do just that in a way that’s sustainable and incredibly tasty, and we couldn’t be happier to join them at this early stage.” 

Pie Insurance, a startup offering workers’ compensation insurance to small businesses, announced this morning that it has closed on $118 million in a Series C round of funding.

Allianz X — investment arm of German financial services giant Allianz — and Acrew Capital co-led the round, which brings the Washington, D.C.-based startup’s total equity funding raised to over $300 million since its 2017 inception. Pie declined to disclose the valuation at which its latest round was raised, other than to say it was “a significant increase.”

Return backers Greycroft, SVB Capital, SiriusPoint, Elefund and Moxley Holdings also participated in the Series C financing.

The startup, which uses data and analytics in its effort to offer SMBs a way to get insurance digitally and more affordably, has seen its revenues climb by 150% since it raised $127 million in a Series B extension last May. Its headcount too has risen — to 260 from 140 last year.

Pie began selling its insurance policies in March 2018. The company declined to give recent hard revenue numbers, saying it only has grown its gross written premium to over $100 million and partnered with over 1,000 agencies nationwide. Last year, execs told me that in the first quarter of 2020, the company had written nearly $19 million in premiums, up 150% from just under $7.5 million during the same period in 2019.

Like many other companies over the past year, Pie Insurance — with its internet-driven, cloud-based platform — has benefited from the increasing further adoption of digital technologies. 

“We are riding that wave,” said Pie Insurance co-founder and CEO John Swigart. “We believe small businesses deserve better than they have historically gotten. And we think that technology can be the means by which that better experience, that more efficient process, and fundamentally, that lower price can be delivered to them.”

Pie’s customer base includes a range of small businesses including trades, contractors, landscapers, janitors, auto shops and restaurants. Pie sells its insurance directly through its website and also mostly through thousands of independent insurance agents.

Workers’ compensation insurance is the only commercial insurance mandated for every company in the United States, points out Lauren Kolodny, founding partner at Acrew Capital.

“Historically, it’s been extremely cumbersome to qualify, onboard and manage workers’ comp insurance — particularly for America’s small businesses which haven’t been prioritized by larger carriers,” she wrote via email. 

Pie, Koldony said, is able to offer underwriting decisions “almost instantly,” digitally and more affordably than legacy insurance carriers.

“I have seen very few insurtech teams that come close,” she added.

Dr. Nazim Cetin, CEO of Allianz X, told TechCrunch via email that his firm believes Pie is operating in an “attractive and growing market that is ripe for digital disruption.”

The company, he said, leverages “excellent,” proprietary data and advanced analytics to be able to provide tailored underwriting and automation. 

“We see some great collaboration opportunities with Allianz companies too,” he added.

Looking ahead, the company plans to use its new capital to invest further in technology and automation, as well as to grow its core workers’ comp insurance business and “lay the groundwork for new business offerings in 2021 and beyond.”

One of the slower weeks for robotics investments I’ve seen since I started doing this roundup. This stuff ebbs and flows, though, and there’s always bound to be a bit of a flurry at the beginning of the year. This week, most of the top news revolves around research, which, let’s be honest, is where most of the really fun stuff happens, anyway.

The other week, I spent a couple of paragraphs talking about why soft robots are interesting and important, but of course, they have their limitations. Like everything else in tech, choosing one version has its plusses and minuses. In the pro column, you can have additional compliance and flexibility. But one of the trade-offs is conductivity.

Some clever new research out of Carnegie Mellon University applies micrometer-sized silver flakes to soft materials like hydrogels, creating what the team likens to, “a second layer of nervous tissue over your skin.” Soft robotics created in this matter could eventually be used for medical purposes, including treatments for stroke patients and people suffering from tremors related to Parkinson’s.

Germany’s Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems published its own soft robotics research this week, alongside Seoul National University and Harvard University. Like a lot of the work in the category, the team is focused on a model inspired by marine life. Here we’re looking at a robotic fish that adjusts its undulation based on the water around it. It’s some interesting insight into how fish move and could be useful in producing soft underwater robots, going forward.

Researchers at MIT, meanwhile, are exploring the proper placement of sensors on soft robotics to help give them a better picture of their environment. This points to another issue with soft robotics: their compliance means they often have a more difficult time determining moving based on their environment. So the team has devised a neural network that could optimize sensor placement.

There is still some robotics investment news this week. Fort Robotics made some waves with a $13 million raise. Unlike a lot of the recent rounds we’ve looked at, the Philadelphia company has a software focus. Specifically, it develops a layer for robotic systems designed to help keep companies safe from a wide range of different issues, from cybersecurity to system failure.

Pieter Abbeel, the director of UC Berkeley’s Robot Learning Lab, has been onstage for a few of our annual TC Sessions: Robotics event. He reached out to let us know that he’s just launched an interview series about AI and robotics that will no doubt be a worthwhile listen, if you’re interested at all in the category.

Spotify today announced it’s rolling out a new look for its streaming service on the desktop, with the launch of a redesigned app for both Mac and Windows, as well as an updated web app. The changes, which will be made available to all global users, focus on improving the navigation and providing users with access to new controls and features across playlists, search, radio, their queue, library, and more.

Overall, the update gives the Spotify app a more streamlined, less cluttered look and feel, compared with the prior version.

One notable change is that the new app does away with the oddly placed search bar that was previously found at the top left of the screen. Now it’s been relocated to the slimmed down navigation bar on the left side, in between the links for Home and Your Library.

The app also no longer details the various destinations within Your Library within this navigation bar — like Made For You, Recently Played, Albums, Artists or Podcasts, for example. Instead, you’ll have to click into your Library section to view these selections.

Now, the Your Library page will feature four categories across the top of the page, starting with Playlists, where you’ll find your Liked Songs, Discover Weekly, Daily Mixes, Release Radar, and more. Playlists is followed by different sections for browsing Podcasts (which got bumped up to the No. 2 spot in the update! hint hint!), then Artists and Albums.

A new dropdown menu in the Your Library lets you further sort these various sections in a variety of ways: by Most Relevant, Recently Played, Recently Added, Alphabetical, or even by a Custom Order you can configure.

Meanwhile, those who like to build playlists will gain a handful of new features in the updated app.

They can now write descriptions, upload their own images, and drag and drop tracks into existing playlists. They can also use a new embedded search bar located at the top of the “Create Playlist” page to seek out new songs or even podcast episodes to add to the playlist. This could greatly speed up the somewhat tedious process of playlist creation, by reducing the steps it takes between finding a track and getting it into a playlist.

This change in particular speaks to Spotify’s growing interest in catering to curators — something co-founder and CEO Daniel Ek mentioned during his recent appearance on the PressClub show on Clubhouse.

Ek explained that he was “excited about curatorship” because when a service’s content library grows, it needs curators.

“The playlisters are incredible on Spotify, but it seems like there’s limited ability to interact with those playlisters — or for those playlisters to really understand who is listening to them and be able to build that second set of creators [who] are indirectly creating by helping other people find content to experience,” he said.

To address this challenge, Ek said Spotify would try to add more tools to allow users to become better curators, if not on a social basis, at least for themselves.

“The primary focus for us on the roadmap is just enabling you to be a much better curator even for yourself —  just by, for instance, suggesting content that’s relevant to the things you’ve already put in the playlist,” he added.

These updated playlist creation tools seem like a natural first step towards Spotify’s larger goals in this area.

A few other changes in the updated apps include a refreshed listener profile page which now features both your top artists and top tracks; a new way to start a radio session for any song or artist via the three-dot (“…”) more menu; and the ability to now edit your Queue and view your Recently Played items on the Desktop app.

Premium subscribers gain another perk, too: they’ll be able to download music and podcasts to listen to offline, via a download button in the Desktop app.

In a blog post announcing the changes, Spotify admitted that it hadn’t quite kept up with the development of its desktop app as its service had grown, and today’s launch is an attempt to correct that.

“At Spotify, we’re always looking for ways to provide the best possible experience so our listeners can consistently discover and enjoy music and podcasts—and that includes look, feel, and functionality. We constantly test, develop, and launch new features, optimize for new devices, and look to expand our content offering,” the post read. “Yet along the way, we felt that our desktop app experience hadn’t kept up, and that it was time for a change.”

The updated apps for Mac, Windows and the web are rolling out starting today.

In January, localized payments provider PPRO became the latest fintech-as-a-service startup to hit a billion-dollar valuation when it closed $180 million in funding. As a mark of how payments and e-commerce continue to be major areas of focus in the global economy, today PPRO is extending that round by another $90 million and adding in two new investors to its cap table.

The financing is coming by way of strategic backing from JPMorgan Chase, and Eldridge (which is the second time this week the PE firm has been in the news for making a major investment in an enterprise tech company: earlier this week Eldridge was one of the leads on a $475 million round for real-time intelligence provider Dataminr).

The enlarged $270 million round — the January tranche was from Eurazeo Growth, Sprints Capital and Wellington Management — includes both primary and secondary capital, and this latest tranche is part of the secondary element, PPRO CEO Simon Black confirmed to me. Prior to this, London-based PPRO (pronounced ‘P-pro’) raised $50 million in August 2020 from Sprints, Citi and HPE Growth; and in 2018 it raised $50 million led by strategic investor PayPal.

PPRO’s core product is a set of APIs that e-commerce companies can integrate into their check-outs to accept payments in whatever local methods and currencies consumers prefer, removing the need for PPRO customers to build those complex and messy integrations themselves. Its business has boomed in the last year as one of the bigger providers of that localized payment technology, with transaction volumes up 60% in 2020 to $11 billion in processed payments.

JPMorgan Chase, meanwhile, is one of the world’s financial giants, providing banking and credit cards among its many other services. The idea is that it wants to build more payment services around its existing relationships and to expand its payment business globally, working more closely with PPRO as part of that. There are two main areas where PPRO could figure: to help its credit card business gain more ubiquity as a payment method in more parts of the globe; and to be a service provider for its business banking customers to help them expand in more markets with more flexible, localized payments.

“We are extending into payments and we are looking to double down on addressing the needs of our clients and their clients, which can be consumers, suppliers or marketplace sellers,” said Sanjay Saraf, MD and Global Head of the Integrated Payments Group at JPMorgan Chase, in an interview. “That last mile becomes important from a customer service perspective.”

In particular, the US company is hoping to double down on its business and footprint in Latin America and Asia Pacific, two emerging markets still seeing a lot of growth in e-commerce, in particular compared to more developed, penetrated and mature markets like the U.S.

This latest round of financing underscores two trends of the moment in fintech.

First, it points to how active the e-commerce market has become — a trend fueled not in small part by the Covid-19 pandemic, and the resulting shift people have made to carrying out everyday tasks online. Second, it’s a sign of how global financial services companies are looking for ways to remain relevant in every market, tapping into more innovations from fintech startups to get there.

The problem, as it exists, is that payments remains a very fragmented business.

The standard methods that a person might use to pay for goods or services online in one country — for example a credit card in the U.S. — might differ drastically from the preferred methods when selling in another — for example, in Belguim one popular format is Bancontact (where you visit a new screen to authorize a transfer from directly from your bank checking account).

As with other payments and fintech-as-a-service startups, the attraction of using PPRO is that it has built a lot of those integrations at the backend and packaged them up as a service, taking away a lot of the complexity, in its case of identifying and integrating each of those payment methods manually, and making it something that can be done seamlessly and quickly.

JPMorgan is now one of several other partners. Those relationships work in both directions, providing partners a way to expand their consumer-facing products, and to help them work with more businesses in more markets. (Similar, I suspect to how JPMorgan will work with it, too.)

Others in PPRO’s network of 100 large global customers include PayPal, Citi, Mastercard Payment Gateway Services, Mollie and Worldpay, which use PPRO’s APIs for a variety of functions, including localised gateway, processing and merchant acquirer services.

It is also not the only one that has identified the opportunity to simplify this part of the payment process and of other complex financial transactions that rely on localized approaches. Others in the same area include Rapyd, Mambu, Thought Machine, Temenos, Edera, Adyen, Stripe and newer players like Unit, with many of these raising very large amounts of money in recent times to double down on what is currently a rapidly expanding market.

The past year has been “an acceleration of a trend, where behaviors are being reinforced,” said Black in an interview. “At the consumer level, we are buying so many more products and services online, and we value convenience more than ever, which translates to a real strengthening of more demand for local payments.”

And while emerging technologies like cryptocurrency continue to see a lot of buzz, this is not at all where mass-market activity is for now. “The big trend is mobile wallets, not bitcoin,” Black said.

The Brazilian-based pan-Latin American food delivery startup iFood has announced a series of initiatives designed to reduce the company’s environmental impact as consumers push companies to focus more on sustainability.

The program has two main components — one focused on plastic pollution and waste and another aiming to become carbon neutral in its operations by 2025.

Perhaps the most ambitious, and surely the most capital intensive of the company’s waste reduction initiatives is the development of a semi-automated recycling facility in Sao Paulo.

“We want to transform the entire supply chain for plastic-free packaging in Brazil. By controlling the national supply chain, from production to marketing and logistics, we can offer more competitive pricing for packaging to industries that already exist but do not have a scale of production and demand today,” said  Gustavo Vitti, the chief people and sustainability officer at iFood. 

 The company has also created an in-app option that allows customers to decline plastic cutlery when they’re getting their food delivered. 

“These initiatives will contribute to reducing the consumption of plastic items, which are often sent without being requested and end up going unused into the garbage bin,” said Vitti. “In the first tests that we did, 90 percent of consumers used the resource, which resulted in the reduction of tens of thousands of plastic cutlery and shows our consumers’ desire to receive less waste in their homes.”

On the emissions front, the company will work with Moss.Earth, a technology company in the carbon market, which developed the GHG inventory to offset its emissions by buying credits tied to environmental preservation and reforestation projects. 

But the company is also working Tembici, a provider of electric bikes in Brazil to move its delivery fleet off of internal combustion powered mopeds or scooters.

“We know that compensation alone is not enough. It is necessary to think of innovative ways to reduce CO2 emissions. In October last year, we launched the iFood Pedal program, in partnership with Tembici, a project developed exclusively for couriers that offers affordable plans for renting electric bikes,” said Vitti. “Currently, more than 2,000 couriers are registered and are sharing 1,000 electric bikes in São Paulo and Rio de Janeiro in addition to the educational aspect of program that we have contemplated. With good adherence indicators, our plan is to gradually expand the project, taking it to other cities and, thus, increase our percentage of clean deliveries.”

The Brazilian electric motorcycle company, Voltz Motors is also working with iFood, which ordered 30 electric motorcycles for use by some of its delivery partners. The company hopes to roll out more than 10,000 motorcycles over the next 12 months. 

Coupled with internal facing initiatives to improve water reuse, deploy renewable energy and develop a green roof at its Osasco headquarters, iFood is hoping to hit sustainability goals that can improve the environment across Brazil and beyond. 

“We know that we have a long way to go, but we trust that together with important partners and this set of initiatives, in addition to others that are under development, it will be possible to reduce plastic generation and CO2 emissions impact on the environment. Our relevance and presence in the lives of Brazilian families further reinforces the importance of these environmental commitments for the planet,” said Vitti.

Clothing giant FatFace had a data breach, but doesn’t want you to tell anyone about it.

The company sent an email to customers this week disclosing that it first detected a breach on January 17. A hacker made off with the customer’s name, email and postal address, and the last four-digits of their credit card. “Full payment card information was not compromised,” the notice reiterated.

But despite going out to thousands of customers, the email said to “keep this email and the information included within it strictly private and confidential,” an entirely unenforceable request.

Under the U.K. data protection laws, a company must disclose a data breach within 72 hours of becoming aware of an incident, but there are no legal requirements on the customer to keep the information confidential. It didn’t take long for the company to face flack from the public. The company didn’t have much to say in response, asking instead to “DM us with any questions.”

In a statement sent via crisis communications firm Kekst CNC, FatFace said: “The notification email was marked private and confidential due to the nature of the communication, which was intended for the individual concerned. Given its contents, we wanted to make this clear, which is why we marked it private and confidential.” (FatFace declined to attribute the statement to a named spokesperson.)

TechCrunch obtained a near-identical email sent to its staff from a former employee who asked not to be named. The email to employees was largely the same as the customer email, but warned that staff may have had their bank account information and their National Insurance numbers — the U.K. equivalent of Social Security — compromised.

FatFace confirmed “a select number of employees, former employees and customers and providing appropriate guidance and support,” but would not say specifically how many customers and employees were affected by the breach.

The home medical supply market in the U.S. is significant and growing, but the way that Americans go about getting much-needed medical supplies, particularly for those with chronic conditions, relies on outdated and clumsy sales mechanisms that often have very poor customer experiences. New startup Better Health aims to change that, with an e-commerce approach to serving customers in need of medical supplies for chronic conditions, and it has raised $3.5 million in a new seed round to pursue its goals.

Better Health estimates the total value of the home medical supplies market in the U.S., which covers all reimbursable devices and supplies needed for chronic conditions, including things like colostomy bags, catheters, mobility aids, insulin pumps and more, is around $60 billion annually. But the market is obviously a specialized one relative to other specialized goods businesses, in part because it requires working not only with customers who make the final decisions about what supplies to use, but also payers, who typically foot the bill through insurance reimbursements.

The other challenge is that individuals with chronic care needs often require a lot of guidance and support when making the decision about what equipment and supplies to select — and the choices they make can have a significant impact on quality of life. Better Health co-founder and CEO Naama Stauber Breckler explained how she came to identify the problems in the industry, and why she set out to address them.

“The first company I started was right out of school, it’s called CompactCath,” she explained in an interview. “We created a novel intermittent catheter, because we identified that there’s a gap in the existing options for people with chronic bladder issues that need to use a catheter on a day-to-day basis […] In the process of bringing it to market, I was exposed to the medical devices and supplies industry. I was just shocked when I realized how hard it is for people today to get life-saving medical supplies, and basically realized that it’s not just about inventing a better product, there’s kind of a bigger systematic problem that locks consumer choice, and also prevents innovation in the space.”

Stauber Breckler’s founding story isn’t too dissimilar from the founding story of another e-commerce pioneer: Shopify. The now-public heavyweight originally got started when founder Tobi Lütke, himself a software engineer like Stauber Breckler, found that the available options for running his online snowboard store were poorly designed and built. With Better Health, she’s created a marketplace, rather than a platform like Shopify, but the pain points and desire to address the problem at a more fundamental level are the same.

With CompactCath, she said they ended up having to build their own direct-to-consumer marketing and sales product, and through that process, they ended up talking to thousands of customers with chronic conditions about their experiences, and what they found exposed the extend of the problems in the existing market.

“We kept hearing the same stories again, and again — it’s hard to find the right supplier, often it’s a local store, the process is extremely manual and lengthy and prone to errors, they get the surprise bills they weren’t expecting,” Stauber Breckler said. “But mostly, it’s just that there is this really sharp drop in care, from the time that you have a surgery or you were diagnosed, to when you need to now start using this device, when you’re essentially left at home and are given a general prescription.”

Unlike in the prescription drug market, where your choices essentially amount to whether you pick the brand name or the generic, and the outcome is pretty much the same regardless, in medical supplies which solution you choose can have a dramatically different effect on your experience. Customers might not be aware, for example, that something like CompactCath exists, and would instead chose a different catheter option that limits their mobility because of how frequently it needs changing and how intensive the process is. Physicians and medical professionals also might not be the best to advise them on their choice, because while they’ve obviously seen patients with these conditions, they generally haven’t lived with them themselves.

“We have talked to people who tell us, ‘I’ve had an ostomy for 19 years, and this is the first time I don’t have constant leakages’ or someone who had been using a catheter for three years and hasn’t left her house for more than two hours, because they didn’t feel comfortable with the product that they had to use it in a public restroom,” Stauber Breckler said. “So they told us things like ‘I finally went to visit my parents, they live in a town three hours away.'”

Better Health can provide this kind fo clarity to customers because it employs advisors who can talk patients through the equipment selection process with one-to-one coaching and product use education. The startup also helps with navigating the insurance side, managing paperwork, estimating costs and even arguing the case for a specific piece of equipment in case of difficulty getting the claim approved. The company leverages peers who have first-hand experience with the chronic conditions it serves to help better serve its customers.

Already, Better Health is a Medicare-licensed provider in 48 states, and it has partnerships in place with commercial providers like Humana and Oscar Health. This funding round was led by 8VC, a firm with plenty of expertise in the healthcare industry and an investor in Stauber Breckler’s prior ventures, and includes participation from Caffeinated Capital, Anorak Ventures, and angels Robert Hurley and Scott Flanders of remote health pioneer eHealth.

Digital House, a Buenos Aires-based edtech focused on developing tech talent through immersive remote courses, announced today it has raised more than $50 million in new funding.

Notably, two of the main investors are not venture capital firms but instead are two large tech companies: Latin American e-commerce giant Mercado Libre and San Francisco-based software developer Globant. Riverwood Capital, a Menlo Park-based private equity firm, and existing backer early-stage Argentina-based venture firm Kaszek also participated in the financing.

The raise brings Digital House’s total funding raised to more than $80 million since its 2016 inception. The Rise Fund led a $20 million Series B for Digital House in December 2017, marking the San Francisco-based firm’s investment in Latin America.

Nelson Duboscq, CEO and co-founder of Digital House, said that accelerating demand for tech talent in Latin America has fueled demand for the startup’s online courses. Since it first launched its classes in March 2016, the company has seen a 118% CAGR in revenues and a 145% CAGR in students. The 350-person company expects “and is on track” to be profitable this year, according to Duboscq.

In 2020, 28,000 students across Latin America used its platform. The company projects that more than 43,000 will take courses via its platform in 2021. Fifty percent of its business comes out of Brazil, 30% from Argentina and the remaining 20% in the rest of Latin America.

Specifically, Digital House offers courses aimed at teaching “the most in-demand digital skills” to people who either want to work in the digital industry or for companies that need to train their employees on digital skills. Emphasizing practice, Digital House offers courses — that range from six months to two years — teaching skills such as web and mobile development, data analytics, user experience design, digital marketing and product development.

The courses are fully accessible online and combine live online classes led by in-house professors, with content delivered through Digital House’s platform via videos, quizzes and exercises “that can be consumed at any time.” 

Digital House also links its graduates to company jobs, claiming an employability rate of over 95%.

Looking ahead, Digital House says it will use its new capital toward continuing to evolve its digital training platforms, as well as launching a two-year tech training program — dubbed the the “Certified Tech Developer” initiative — jointly designed with Mercado Libre and Globant. The program aims to train thousands of students through full-time two-year courses and connect them with tech companies globally. 

Specifically, the company says it will also continue to expand its portfolio of careers beyond software development and include specialization in e-commerce, digital marketing, data science and cybersecurity. Digital House also plans to expand its partnerships with technology employers and companies in Brazil and the rest of Latin America. It also is planning some “strategic M&A,” according to Duboscq.

Francisco Alvarez-Demalde, co-founder & co-managing partner of Riverwood Capital, noted that his firm has observed an accelerating digitization of the economy across all sectors in Latin America, which naturally creates demand for tech-savvy talent. (Riverwood has an office in São Paulo).

For example, in addition to web developers, there’s been increased demand for data scientists, digital marketing and cybersecurity specialists.

“In Brazil alone, over 70,000 new IT professionals are needed each year and only about 45,000 are trained annually,” Alvarez-Demalde said. “As a result of such a talent crunch, salaries for IT professionals in the region increased 20% to 30% last year. In this context, Digital House has a large opportunity ahead of them and is positioned strategically as the gatekeeper of new digital talent in Latin America, preparing workers for the jobs of the future.”

André Chaves, senior VP of Strategy at Mercado Libre, said the company saw in Digital House a track record of “understanding closely” what Mercado Libre and other tech companies need.

“They move as fast as we do and adapt quickly to what the job market needs,” he said. “A very important asset for us is their presence and understanding of Latin America, its risks and entrepreneurial environment. Global players have succeeded for many years in our region. But things are shifting gradually, and local knowledge of risks and opportunities can make a great difference.”

The latest in a string of space tech SPACs announced this year is Redwire, an entity created by a PE firm in 2020, which has acquired a number of smaller companies including Adcole Space, Roccor, Made in Space, LoadPath, Oakman Aerospace, Deployable Space Systems and more — all within the last year or so. Redwire announced that it will go public through a merger with special purpose acquisition company Genesis Park Acquisition Crop., and the combined company will list on the NYSE.

The deal puts Redwire’s pro forma enterprise value at %615 million, and is expected to provide an additional $170 million to Redwire’s coffers post-merger, including a PIPE valued at over $100 million. Unsurprisingly, one of the uses of the proceeds that Redwire intends to pursue is continued M&A activity to build out its list of service offering in the space domain.

Redwire’s mandate isn’t specifically to go after new space companies, and instead its targets share in common expertise in a particular, rather narrow slice of the severally space market. It’s capabilities include on-orbit manufacturing and servicing; satellite design, manufacture and assembly; payload integration; sensor design and development, and more. The idea appears to be to build a full-stack infrastructure company that can offer tip-to-tail space technology services, exclusive really only of launch and ground station components (for now).

It’s a smart approach for a bourgeoning new space economy where increasingly, technology companies who want to operate in space would rather focus on their unique value proposition, and outsource the complex, but mostly settled business of actually getting to, and operating in, space. Other companies are addressing the market in similar ways, with launchers bringing more of that part of the process in-house so their payload customers basically only have to show up with the sensor or communication device they want to send to space, and the launcher providing everything else — including even the satellite, in the relatively near future.

Redwire has proven revenue-generating power, with projected 2021 revenue of $163 million, and many of the companies now operating under its umbrella are fairly mature and have been operating cash flow positive for many years. Accordingly, a SPAC as a path to public markets likely does make sense in this particular instance, but the increasing frequency and volume of space companies choosing this route, is, on the whole, a trend to watch with healthy skepticism.