Author: azeeadmin

Video streaming platforms have signed up more subscribers during Covid-19 lockdowns, and that growth is expected to continue after the pandemic, showcasing more international content. When subtitles are well done, they don’t take audiences out of the immersive experience of a good show or movie. This means as content providers tackle worldwide expansion, demand for localization services, including translated subtitles, is also growing. Iyuno Media Group is one of the largest media localization companies, and works with clients including Netflix, Apple iTunes, DreamWorks, HBO and Entertainment One.

A lot has changed since Iyuno was started in 2002 by executive chairman David Lee while he was an undergraduate in Seoul. Back then it provided mainly English to Korean subtitles for television networks. “I started the business in my last year of university and, of course, back then we didn’t have any video streaming services,” he said. “Our client base was mostly local and some regional broadcasters.”

Now Iyuno, whose investors include SoftBank Ventures Asia, provides localization services for about 600,000 hours of content on an annual basis, including translation, subtitling, dubbing, accessibility features and compliance with local content regulations, in more than 80 languages. It operates 35 facilities across 30 countries in the Americas, Asia Pacific, Europe and the Middle East. Iyuno also announced in January that it has entered into an agreement with Imagica Group to acquire SDI Media, another localization provider.

In order to make the current scale of its services possible, Iyuno built its own cloud-based enterprise resource planning software. The platform enables uploading of files from content providers, and includes features for time coding, translation, content and technical quality control, and distribution back to Iyuno’s clients. It onboards, trains and assesses new freelancers, and gives teams working on the same project a central base.

Iyuno also built its own neural machine translation engines, which are trained on data from specific genres (for example, drama, animation, comedies, horror and documentary), and help its teams work more accurately and quickly.

Localizing entertainment in a more connected world

Being able to guarantee consistent results with fast turnaround times is especially important now that OTT services are erasing international and cultural barriers between audiences, and the shows and movies they watch.

“Good shows, even in non-English languages, perform well in other countries,” said Lee. “Because of Covid, productions have been majorly affected. OTT providers need fresh content to keep subscribers and are licensing non-U.S. content in countries where it hadn’t been licensed a lot in the past.”

Parrot Analytics recently told Axios that non-American shows accounted for nearly 30% of demand in the United States during the third-quarter of 2020. That trend began before the pandemic, but production shutdowns meant many networks and streaming services began showing more international content to meet audience demands.

 

This means localization services are not only working with more shows and movies that were originally filmed in non-English languages, but also translating it into a wider array of languages, which involves a lot of teamwork.

“In a single language for a single hour of video running time, it usually takes around five or six different steps, and four or five different individuals,” including translators and quality control checkers, said Lee.

For content that is translated into a single other language, Iyuno hires people who can listen to the show and translate at the same time, without having to use a script. Files from Iyuno’s clients are uploaded onto its platform and proxy files are generated with watermarks and other security measures. Then the translator gets a link to the video. After they are done adding their translation, the subtitled content goes through a preset quality control process, and then is formatted and delivered back to the client.

The process for translating content into several different languages follows a similar procedure, except the original language is first transcribed into a script, and then sent to translators so they can work as a team. Then subtitled content is sent to a central quality control team to make sure it is consistent before being delivered to the client.

For some content, like live broadcasts or episodes of television dramas that are edited shortly before airing, Iyuno can provide very quick turnaround times, typically 24 hours, but sometimes as little as one or two hours. In those scenarios, Iyuno begins recording when the show starts airing. Then it divides the footage into 10-minute segments that are sent to teams of three people: a time coder, translator and quality control checker, who usually work from home and are logged into Iyuno’s ERP platform. It takes about an hour to translate each 10-minute section, so that means six teams are usually involved at the same time during an hour-long process.

Preserving an immersive experience

Quality control includes ensuring subtitles and other localization features for a show maintain consistent quality across languages, and also checking technical factors, since there are more than 100 subtitle formats. Iyuno’s quality checkers make sure subtitles are placed unobtrusively on the screen, don’t obscure important details and avoid overlapping between dialogue from different characters or scenes.

“We like to have buffers because reading speed is usually slower than hearing speed,” said Lee. Iyuno’s platform has scene detection tools, which analyzes video and automatically organizes subtitles so they don’t roll over into another scene.

Creating accessibility features currently accounts for about 5% to 10% of Iyuno’s business and is growing. That includes audio descriptions for people with visual impairments, which means adding narration that describes what is happening on screen, and closed captions with descriptions of all the sounds that are happening in a show.

“It’s a growing demand and it’s very important for clients, who are keen to serve those audiences,” said Lee.

One of the things translators need to do when working on shows is to keep the original intent of the creator in languages with different colloquialisms or cultural nuances.

“I was a subtitler, and it’s usually not a very dry job of translating the foreign language into ours, or the other way around,” Lee said. “It’s really immersing yourself into the content, so at times you forget to translate because you’re watching the show and understanding the feeling, laughs, sadness or character dynamics.”

Iyuno’s machine translation engines are able to help with the process by performing the initial translation, so human translators can focus more on a show’s creative aspects.

“It’s more a subjective and qualitative thing. It’s hard to put into technical words, but we try to find efficiencies to reinforce that creativity,” Lee added. “At the same time, most of our translators had that learning and experience before they came to the company, so they’re aware that those are aspects they need to deal with and, in many cases, I think that’s where a machine can never substitute a human.”

This Friday, the European Commission will be launching a ‘legislative instrument’ called the EU Startup Nations Standard (SNS) at its annual Digital Day. Now, before you think I’m about to bore you to death, you might like to know that the SNS is a huge political initiative. It will aim to make the European Union the most attractive place to create a startup, in comparison with obvious global leaders like the US. Therefore, its significance is not to be underestimated.

The idea is for EU Member States to implement a set of ‘best practice’ policies for startups (many of which already exist in parts of the EU), ranging from startup visas to better implementation of stock options in company law. If EU member states all sign up to the EU’s ideas, the hope is that startups get better conditions, stay in the EU rather than leaving for the US (or, now, the UK…) and the SNS will mean more peer-pressure between Member States to get all these conditions right.

Sources close to the European Commission tell me that the – yet unreleased – SNS will be wide-ranging and call on EU member states to implement several startup-friendly policies, launched during the Portuguese Presidency of the EU, a country where startups are now flourishing. Member States which become signatories of the Standard will be expected to deliver on a number of policy areas.

I have seen leaked drafts of the SNS and it clearly includes some big proposals, assuming they are all contained in the final, published draft. They include the expectation that signatories will need to change national rules around stock options to ensure employee share ownership is not subject to capital gains tax until the moment of cash receipt. They will also need to allow startups to issue stock options with non-voting rights; fast-track the process of creating a new company to within one day for 100 EUR; accelerate visa processing for tech talent from outside the EU, and incentivize the return of EU tech-talent. There is also an exhortation to leverage the €750bn of Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF) to support startups, and reduce regulatory red tape and the create regulatory sandboxes. For many EU countries, it should be relatively easy, for others, there will be some legislative hurdles to leap. But most observers say these provisions are over-due and necessary.

EU-based campaign groups are, generally speaking, wildly in favor of the SNS. Allied For Startups tells me they are “enthusiastic about the potential of the instrument”. They say the provisions are a collection of best practices that already exist, challenge member states to do more, and set ‘binary challenges’ that states can either fulfill or not (like launch a startup online in a day). But that depends if all the things they hope for come to pass. They are waiting with bated breath to find out if the provisions have been watered down or how many Member States sign up to it all.

There are other groups that are enthusiastic but also concerned. Not Optional, a policy initiative funded by Index Ventures, has, this week, published an open letter signed by many of Europe’s leading investors, startup associations and entrepreneurs including those who founded Stripe, Personio, Klarna, Wise, Trustpilot, UiPath and Alan.

The letter welcomes the EU’s Startup Nations Standard, in particular its specific recommendations to Member States on “changes to stock options rules designed to help startups attract talent, speed up tech visas targeting and procurement.”

However, the group is also urging EU Member States to turn the recommendations into actual national legislation, and not just stay on the books at the EU Commission.

Not Optional points out that its own ranking of European nations’ stock options policies showed dramatically stark differences around how EU members states treat the issues, with, for instance, Latvia, Estonia and France ranking highly, while founders in Germany, Spain, and Belgium still face barriers when they try to use stock options to incentivize staff and attract talent.

But we are not out of the woods yet.

While there is enthusiasm emanating from the corridors of Brussels, my sources tell me that some countries, such as Germany, may be looking to water the SNS down in some aspects. In particular, Germany has been kicking up a fuss about the startup-in-a-day provision, on the grounds that identity checks may take longer. Given the UK, an EU member until only recently, has had this capability for at least 10 years, Germany’s protestations seem somewhat over-egged.

All eyes will be on the announcement on Friday.

Plentywaka, a Nigerian bus-booking platform, today announced that it has been accepted into the Techstars Toronto accelerator program.

It will join nine other startups in the class of 2021 and secure funding from the accelerator as it sets its sights on global expansion.

The Lagos-based company, founded by Onyeka Akumah, Johnny Ena, John Shaibu and Afolabi Oluseyi, operates an ‘Uber-for-buses’ model connecting commuters with buses via an app.

Plentywaka launched in September 2019, and in the first two months, moved an average of six people daily, according to CEO Akumah. By its sixth month, this number increased to about 1,500 daily, and the company completed more than 100,000 rides within that timeframe.

Then in March 2020, the pandemic-induced lockdown hit businesses across Lagos and other states within Nigeria. Due to the nature of its business, Plentywaka had to make a slight pivot and began transporting essential services across Lagos, especially food items. It also opened a logistics service.

As the lockdown eased across the city and commuting resumed, the company moved 60% capacity while the operational cost remained the same. Although growth was steady and picking up, the company started seeking external investment. It received $300,000 pre-seed from its parent company, EMFATO and other early-stage investors like Microtraction and Niche Capital in August.

Backed with the new funding, Plentywaka has since doubled down on its core offering — transporting people via buses. The logistics arm that it launched, as well as a car service, have since been shuttered.

Akumah says the focus on a primary offering has paid a dividend. The company has expanded its intrastate services into two other cities in Nigeria including the country’s capital city, Abuja and has moved about 300,000 people. Following this announcement though, there are immediate plans to launch an interstate service across different cities in Nigeria.

This service will see Plentywaka partner with some major bus travel companies, which collectively have more than 2000 buses and ply over 100 routes in the country. Plentywaka acts as an aggregator, and commuters can see options of various transport companies, compare fares, and book on its platform.

“Plentywaka is getting to a point where we’re now becoming more like an aggregator as we onboard transportation companies on our platform. Interstate travel in Nigeria is data insufficient, and we want to be the first company to solve this.” Ena, co-founder and president of Plentywaka, said to TechCrunch. 

In addition to this and the new capital from Techstars, Plentywaka is looking to scale its platform across Africa and North America. Akumah says this global expansion plan will start with a city in Canada, most likely Toronto, on or before Q4 2021.

Sunil Sharma, the managing director of Techstars Toronto, confirmed this to TechCrunch. According to Sharma, Techstars is backing the Nigerian mobility startup because it’s solving a massive problem in Nigeria that can be likened to urban transportation challenges in other populated cities worldwide.

“We know that Western cities have legacy transportation systems. However, there are many transportation challenges, even in a city like Toronto,” he said. “And we think that Plentywaka’s technology and approach in improving the lives of citizens and their daily commute needs can be brought over to cities in the West just as they are in Africa.”

Plentywaka plans to launch its intracity service first after engaging the country’s necessary stakeholders before introducing the intercity model. Sharma thinks that most cities in Canada aren’t well serviced by buses, leading to a broken intercity transit infrastructure. Plentywaka’s presence will bring the much-needed option the city deserves, he says.

“Cities and towns here should have bus connectivity, but they quite simply don’t have it, and my view is that the arrival of Plentywaka will be an immediate option to the status quo. It will also resonate with people as a way to supplement existing transportation options,” he said.

Techstars’ relationship with Akumah also proved crucial in Plentywaka’s acceptance into the accelerator. A second-time Techstars-backed founder, Akumah co-founded Farmcrowdy, a Nigerian digital agriculture platform in 2016. Having gone through the accelerator’s Atlanta program four years ago with the agritech startup, Akumah is doing the same with Plentywaka. He doubles as CEO at both companies. 

The serial founder said the relationship with Techstars is one reason the company is expanding to Canada instead of neighbouring African countries.

“If the opportunity we have in Toronto right now to expand was similar to what we had in Ghana or South Africa, of course we’ll be having those conversations already. But when we have the support system from Techstars, Sunil, and regulators in Toronto without even putting feet on the ground, I mean that makes it exciting for us to expand to Canada,” the CEO remarked.

Nigerian or African startups, in general, rarely make their way into Canada. Plentywaka is on the verge of doing so, and it will be looking to close a seed round from investors to carry out these expansion plans and further improve its technology.

About four years ago, social impact organization Norrsken Foundation launched a small program investing around EUR30 million in capital it had received from its wealthy patron, Klarna co-founder Niklas Adalberth.

Now, that initiative has become its own impact investment firm, Norrsken VC and, according to people familiar with the firm, is about to close on its first independent investment vehicle — a 125 million euro fund focused on investing in startups that are, as its website suggests, “solving the world’s biggest problems”

Norrsken VC did not respond for a request for comment about the firm’s fundraising plans.

Already, the young firm has invested in companies that would be standouts among any venture capital portfolio. Norrsken VC is one of the early backers behind Northvolt, which just received a $14 billion order for its batteries for electric vehicles from Volkswagen.

Electrification is actually a big theme for the early-stage firm, which counts the electric plane technology developer, Heart Aerospace, and autonomous electric vehicle developer Einride, and the battery monitoring and data management startup, Nortical, among its other portfolio companies.

Einride scored another huge coup recently. TechCrunch reported that the company was close to closing on $75 million in new funding even as it explored a potential SPAC for its business.

Indeed, Norrsken Foundation’s work in investing presaged a surge in climate and sustainability-focused activity from both venture investors, public markets and entrepreneurs looking at how to aid in the transition from fossil fuels to renewable resources and other zero carbon sources of energy.

That thesis on energy consumption extends to other areas of the firm’s portfolio, including companies like the energy efficient data center designer and technology developer, Submer.

If electrification and efficiency are one area of focus in the climate fight, Norrsken has also made moves to combat waste and improve efficiency in the food chain, as well. It’s probably the largest area of focus for the firm’s current portfolio outside of electrification, and there appear to be some early winners emerging in that category.

Those range from startups focused on agriculture like WeFarm and Ignitia, to consumer waste in the food industry through investments in Olio, Matsmart and Whywaste.

Taken together the climate and sustainability thesis has been the largest and most opportune investment target, but healthcare and wellness are also within the firm’s investment mandate. Startups like Winningtemp are an interesting indication of the firm’s thesis. That startup provides ways to monitor and support employees’ mental health.

 

Uber said Tuesday that drivers in the UK who use its ride-hailing app will be treated as workers, a designation that will give them some benefits such as holiday pay. However, even as Uber seemingly concedes to a Supreme Court ruling last month, a new fight could already be brewing over the company’s decision to calculate working time from the point a trip commences — rather than when drivers log on to the app.

Uber said that beginning Wednesday all drivers in the UK will be paid holiday time based on 12.07% of their earnings, which will be paid out every two weeks. Drivers will also be paid at least the minimum wage (called the National Living Wage) after accepting a trip request and after expenses, Uber said in a statement. Eligible drivers in the UK will automatically be enrolled into a pension plan with contributions from Uber. These contributions will represent approximately 3% of a driver’s earnings.

In the UK, there are three designations: self-employed, employed and worker. The “workers” designation doesn’t make them employees, but it is still entitles them to the minimum wage, holiday pay, and, if eligible, a pension.

Uber said Tuesday that based on current expectations, the company is not changing its previously announced expectations for Adjusted EBITDA for the first quarter or for 2021.

Uber has been entangled in fight over worker classification in the UK since 2016. Last month, the UK’s Supreme Court dismissed Uber’s appeal, which reaffirmed earlier rulings that drivers using the app are workers and not independent contractors. With no place to turn, Uber has conceded — sort of. Uber will only guarantee that drivers’ working time and other benefits will accrue once they accept a trip and not based on when they have signed into the app to begin working. That already has labor activists fuming.

“While we welcome Uber’s decision to finally commit to paying minimum wage, holiday pay and pensions we observe that they have arrived to the table with this offer a day late and a dollar short, literally,” according to a statement from the App Drivers & Couriers Union and signed by James Farrar and Yaseen Aslam, the two drivers who brought a case against Uber. “The Supreme Court ruled that drivers are to be recognized as workers with entitlements to the minimum wage and holiday pay to accrue on working time from log on to log off whereas Uber is committing only to these entitlements to accrue from time of trip acceptance to drop off. This means that Uber drivers will be still short-changed to the tune of 40-50%. Also, it is not acceptable for Uber to unilaterally decide the driver expense base in calculating minimum wage. This must be subject to collective agreement.

While Uber undoubtedly has made progress here, we cannot accept anything less than full compliance with legal minimums. We would also expect to see Uber make progress towards trade union recognition, a fair dismissals appeals process and a data access agreement.”

With the UK issue mostly settled, Uber will likely turn its attention to cases are still playing out in courts in other European countries — decisions which could put pressure on Uber’s bottom line. Meanwhile, EU lawmakers are also consulting on how to improve conditions for gig workers so Uber’s concession in the UK is likely feed into pan-EU negotiations.

The transportation industry is abuzz with upstarts, legacy automakers, suppliers and tech companies working on automated vehicle technology, digital platforms, electrification and robotics. Then there are shared mobility companies from cars to scooters and mopeds to ebikes. And who can forget the emerging air taxi companies?

At the center of this evolving industry are the investors. Simply put: TechCrunch can’t hold an event on mobility without hearing from the people who are hunting for the best opportunities in the industry and tracking all of its changes. That’s why we’re happy to announce investors Clara Brenner of Urban Innovation Fund, Quin Garcia of Autotech Ventures and Rachel Holt of Construct Capital will join us on our virtual stage at TC Sessions: Mobility 2021. The virtual event, which features the best and brightest minds in the world of mobility, will be held on June 9.

p.s. Early Bird tickets to the show are now available – book today and save 35% before prices go up.

Brenner, Garcia and Holt will come on stage to discuss their near and long-term investment strategies, overlooked opportunities, and challenges that face startups trying to break into the transportation sector. They’ll lean on their considerable experience to provide the advice and insight that will help attendees understand the state of the industry and where it is headed.

Brenner is a serial co-founder. She is co-founder and managing partner of the Urban Innovation Fund, a venture capital firm that provides seed capital and regulatory support to entrepreneurs solving urban challenges. Urban Innovation Fund has backed curbflow, Electriphi and Kyte among others. She also co-founded Tumml, a startup hub for urban tech that provided 38 startups with seed funding and mentorship, and hosts events around urban innovation. In 2014, Forbes listed her as one of its “30 Under 30” for Social Entrepreneurship.

Garcia, a lifelong ‘car guy’ with an MS degree in management science and automotive engineering from Stanford University, is managing director at Autotech Ventures. He’s also a board director, board observer and advisory board member to a number of mobility companies including Lyft, Peloton Technology, and Connected Signals.

Garcia has been on the ground floor of startups, notably as part of the initial team at the electric vehicle infrastructure startup Better Place, where he was responsible for partnerships with automakers and parts suppliers while living in Israel, Japan and China.

Holt is co-founder and Managing Partner of early-stage venture firm Construct Capital, which is focused on finding founders that are trying to change foundational industries such as manufacturing and supply chain, logistics and transportation. The company’s transportation-focused investments include ChargeLab. Holt also sits on the board of MotoRefi.

Prior to Construct, Holt was at Uber, where she was one of the company’s first 30 employees. During her 8.5-year stint at Uber, Holt rose through the ranks of the company, including roles running the U.S.  and Canada “Rides” business as well as global marketing and customer support. She was a longtime member of the company’s executive leadership team. Her last position at Uber was leading the company’s new mobility organization, which focused on its e-bike and scooter businesses as well as running its incubator, which funded and developed new products and services.

Rachel began her career at Bain & Company, advising companies in the private equity, financial services and healthcare industries. She was ranked No. 9 on Fortune’s 40 under 40 and was named by Fast Company as One of the Most Creative People in Business.

We can’t wait to hear from this investor panel at TC Sessions: Mobility on June 9. Make sure to grab your Early Bird pass before May 6 to save 35% on tickets and join the fun!

Google is letting developers keep more of their Play revenue, Instagram adds teen safety features and we examine the global distribution of venture funding. This is your Daily Crunch for March 16, 2021.

The big story: Google Play halves commission on first $1M

Following a similar move by Apple last year, Google said that it will be reducing its fee from 30% to 15% for the first $1 million that developers earn through Google Play annually.

This is slightly different from Apple’s approach, in that it applies to all developers — although the fee goes back to 30% for any money earned beyond that first million dollars.

“We’ve heard from our partners making $2 million, $5 million and even $10 million a year that their services are still on a path to self-sustaining orbit,” wrote Google’s Sameer Samat. “This is why we are making this reduced fee on the first $1 million of total revenue earned each year available to every Play developer that uses the Play billing system, regardless of size.”

The tech giants

Instagram adds new teen safety tools as competition with TikTok heats up — Instagram says it’s rolling out new safety features that will restrict adult users from being able to contact teens who didn’t already follow them.

Google’s Soli radar returns to track sleep on the new Nest Hub — We haven’t heard a peep from Project Soli since the technology was introduced with the Pixel in late-2019.

China wants to dismantle Alibaba’s media empire: reports — Over the years, Jack Ma has accumulated a media portfolio in China that rivals that of Jeff Bezos in the United States.

Startups, funding and venture capital

Socure raises $100M at $1.3B valuation, proving identity verification is hotter than ever — Socure uses AI and machine learning to verify identities.

Overwolf raises $52.5M for its platform to build, distribute and monetize in-game, user-generated content — The company’s platform has some 30,000 creators, 90,000 mods and add-ons, and 18 million monthly users across thousands of games.

Aiming to become the definitive source for location data, SafeGraph raises $45M — While there are plenty of companies selling data about physical locations, SafeGraph CEO Auren Hoffman said his startup is “one of the few companies to sell this data to data science teams.”

Advice and analysis from Extra Crunch

The global inequity in venture financing is staggering — There’s been a boom in Latin American and European fintechs, as well as a general rise in VC activity in a host of Asian countries, but the landscape remains imbalanced.

The NFT market is just getting started, but where is it headed? — Part one in a three-part series.

Farmland could be the next big asset class modernized by marketplace startups — Startups like AcreTrader and others including Tillable, FarmTogether and Harvest Returns are bringing marketplace models to the farming world.

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

Everything else

Ford expands robotics research into $75 million University of Michigan facility — Ford Motor Company will be embedding 100 of its researchers and engineers in a new robotics and mobility facility on the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus.

Talking product-market fit with Sean Lane, whose company tore through 28 products to become a unicorn — Occasionally, it’s easy for startups to achieve so-called product-market fit, but more often, it’s a struggle.

Get feedback on your pitch deck from tech leaders on Extra Crunch Live — The importance of the pitch deck can’t be underestimated.

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.

As enterprises around the world pour more money into research and invention to stay competitive, the need for analyzing the worthiness of R&D expenses also grows.

One company serving that function is PatSnap. When co-founder Jeffrey Tiong was working in the medical devices industry more than a decade ago, he realized how critical intellectual property and patents were in the tech world.

In 2007, Tiong launched PatSnap in Singapore to build a global patent search database and overtime pushed the firm into adjacent realms. PatSnap’s more recent software, which Tiong dubs “innovation intelligence,” helps enterprises analyze their R&D strategies, keep track of competitors, and identify potential partners by crunching data around the likes of scientific papers, government R&D grants and startup funding news.

“What we found is that a lot of companies [treat] innovation as a department, as a function, as a KPI in an organization,” said Tiong. “Many companies are hiring people… who have to find out what kind of technology is out there and who is doing what. You cannot do everything by yourself nowadays. You need to partner.”

Investors are paying attention to the R&D boom. In PatSnap’s latest funding round, the company attracted SoftBank’s Vision Fund II and Tencent as lead investors. The Series E round totals $300 million, with participation from CITIC Industrial Fund, which is part of Chinese state-owned conglomerate CITIC Group; Sequoia China; Xiaomi founder Lei Jun’s Shunwei Capital; and Vertex Ventures.

Masayoshi Son spent less than half an hour on a call with Tiong before the billionaire founder of SoftBank hammered out a deal for PatSnap. In his early twenties, Son invented and patented a device that he sold for $1 million, so “he understands the importance of inventions, IP and innovation,” Tiong said.

Tiong declined to disclose PatSnap’s post-money valuation in an interview with TechCrunch but said the number has crossed $1 billion.

The United States is PatSnap’s largest market, although China is rapidly growing as a revenue stream amid the country’s patent filing spree. In 1999, the World Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) received just 276 applications from China. By 2019, that number rose to 58,990, surpassing that of the United States.

But compared with their western counterparts, Chinese corporations are less inclined to pay big bucks for software, which makes it challenging for SaaS companies to monetize in the country. PatSnap operates under the brand Zhihuiya in China, with customers ranging from retail brands, research institutes, AI firms to pharmaceutical giants.

The sheer number of patents doesn’t translate conveniently into technological clout. The U.S. is still ahead of China in terms of R&D expenditure, Tiong observed. Furthermore, “the quality of the patents in China is not as strong and a lot of them are increment innovation instead of groundbreaking types of invention,” he added.

PatSnap says it now has more than 10,000 customers in over 50 countries, with a 700-person workforce spread across the U.S., Europe, Canada, Japan and China. Some of its notable customers include Tesla, General Electric, Siemens, Dyson, PalPal, Spotify and Megvii. With the fresh capital, the company plans to further develop products, acquire more domain expertise, expand global sales presence and invest in human capital.

Data is a gold mine for a company.

If managed well, it provides the clarity and insights that lead to better decision-making at scale, in addition to an important tool to hold everyone accountable.

However, most companies are stuck in Data 1.0, which means they are leveraging data as a manual and reactive service. Some have started moving to Data 2.0, which employs simple automation to improve team productivity. The complexity of crypto data has opened up new opportunities in data, namely to move to the new frontier of Data 3.0, where you can scale value creation through systematic intelligence and automation. This is our journey to Data 3.0.

Coinbase is neither a finance company nor a tech company — it’s a crypto company. This distinction has big implications for how we work with data. As a crypto company, we work with three major types of data (instead of the usual one or two types of data), each of which is complex and varied:

1. blockchain: decentralized and publicly available
2. product: large and real-time
3. financial: high-precision and subject to many financial/legal/compliance regulations.

Our focus has been on how we can scale value creation by making this varied data work together, eliminating data silos, solving issues before they start and creating opportunities for Coinbase that wouldn’t exist otherwise.

Having worked at tech companies like LinkedIn and eBay, and also those in the finance sector, including Capital One, I’ve observed firsthand the evolution from Data 1.0 to Data 3.0. In Data 1.0, data is seen as a reactive function providing ad-hoc manual services or firefighting in urgent situations.

Squarespace has raised $300 million in a round of funding that values the company at a staggering $10 billion valuation.

New backers include Dragoneer, Tiger Global, D1 Capital Partners, Fidelity Management & Research Company, funds and accounts advised by T. Rowe Price Associates, Inc. and Spruce House. Existing backers Accel and General Atlantic also participated. 

Squarespace Founder & CEO Anthony Casalena said the fresh capital will advance the company’s growth initiatives and help it scale its product suite.

The move comes less than two months after the company filed confidentiality to go public via a direct listing or initial public offering.

Squarespace, which has helped millions create their own websites, was founded in 2003 and bootstrapped until a $38.5 million Series A in 2010 that was co-led by Accel and Index Ventures.

The online website creation and hosting service — which has now expanded into e-commerce by hosting online stores — then raised another $40M round in 2014. But it is perhaps best known for its epic 2017-era $200 million secondary round that General Atlantic financed. 

At that time, TechCrunch reported that Squarespace was a profitable company, with revenues increasing 50 percent in the prior year to about $300 million. Squarespace is declining to comment on its latest funding round beyond a post on its website.

New York City-based Squarespace has over 1200 employees spread across its headquarters and offices in Dublin, Ireland; Portland, Oregon and Los Angeles, California.