Author: azeeadmin

Madrid-based TaxDown, which automates income tax filing by calculating regional deductions due to users so they don’t have to navigate complex tax rules themselves, has raised €2.4 million (~$3M) in seed funding.

US-based FJ Labs has joined TaxDown’s investment board as it closes the seed round. It says all its previous investors participated in the round, including James Argalas (Presidio Union); Abac Nest, Abac’s venture capital business; Baldomero Falcones, the former Chairman at Mastercard; and the founders of Jobandtalent, Juan Urdiales and Felipe Navío (another Madrid-based startup).

For the past three years TaxDown been offering a service in Spain but is now eyeing international expansion, as well as further growth in its home market.

Last year, it says it managed more than €29M in taxes for users — delivering savings of €4M+ to users.

Its target is to hit 500,000 users in Spain this year. While international expansion is planned for the second half of 2021, with TaxDown saying it’s focused on other European and Latin American markets.

“From the beginning, our ambition has been to help people fill in their taxes all over the world. That is why we developed our proprietary software/tax language that allows a tax expert with no coding capabilities to translate the tax law into calculation and logic that can be interpreted by our backend seamlessly,” says Enrique García, CEO and co-founder. “This tax language allowed us to launch in Spain in 4 months with only one tax consultant. We are confident that we can launch a new country in only 6 months.”

“The tax filing process is far from being simple,” he goes on, explaining how its tech simplifies income tax filing in Spain. “Currently, when using the Spanish Tax Agency tax-filling tool, taxpayers need to manually apply deductions on their tax forms. The problem is, with national regional deductions being different in each region in Spain, taxpayers often do not even know they’re entitled to those deductions. Thus, by not applying them to their tax form, they lose money. What TaxDown does is leverage the advanced Spanish Tax Agency technology, which offers an API to request the financial data related to a taxpayer — always with prior authorization from the user — with 2.000+ datapoints.

“Once we have that, our algorithm ‘RITA’ is capable of understanding the user’s personal and financial data, select the optimum questions that the user needs to answer — an average of 9 over a database of 3.000+ – and precisely calculate the tax return, with no errors.”

“Technology is the heart of TaxDown,” he adds. “Besides our algorithm RITA that has been trained with over 40.000+ tax returns, today we also use AI to help our ‘taxers’ with tips on how to lower future tax bills, and we have started working on live income tax simulation for our users throughout the entire year.”

García says TaxDown calculated more than 42,000 tax returns last year with a team of just two in-house tax experts — thanks to proprietary internal tools which allow them to handle this scale (by being “80x more efficient than the Spanish average”, as he puts it). He adds that further efficiency gains are expected.

“We have developed a machine-learning tool that flags the tax returns that need to be reviewed before filing based on historical data. Thus, we continuously increase the percentage of tax returns that are automatically submitted with no manual intervention,” he tells TechCrunch, adding: “Thanks to this feature, we expect to improve our efficiency at least 5x versus last year.”

According to García, TaxDown has never had any filings rejected for inaccuracies because he says its algorithms continually run tests and validate the information with the authorities. “Furthermore, our technology can flag errors in real time in case that there is a discrepancy, so our tax experts can manually check the tax return form if needed,” he adds.

Its business model — currently — is a sort of twist on freemium, in that it will only charge users if the income tax savings it calculates for them exceed €35.

García says that so far an average of three out of 10 users see financial savings from using its tool — but he suggests it’s not only savings that motivate users; he says they also want reassurance that they are taking “the best approach with their taxes: doing them effortlessly, correctly, with all the guarantees, tapping for experts’ live help at any time, ensuring the best result they can get, and of course knowing that we have their backs in case of an audit”.

Given that wider relationship it’s building with users, TaxDown sees potential to evolve its business model by expanding to offer additional fintech services, such as financial advice, in the future.

“Our vision goes far beyond income tax return preparation, we believe that tax data is becoming one of the most valuable data assets for people (take Trump’s tax returns for example), and we want to assess our ’taxers’ based on the best and more qualitative information that we can get,” says García. “Therefore, in the future we want to be a trusted financial advisor not just for taxes, but for personal finances as well. We believe we are well positioned to be an intermediary between our users and financial institutions.”

As 2021 kicked off, I reformulated a series of posts we published last year focused on startups that had reached the $100 million ARR (annual recurring revenue) mark. In our refreshed effort, we cut the target in half and dug up companies around the $50 million ARR threshold. The goal was to figure out what those firms were going through as they reached material scale, not after they had achieved effective pre-IPO status.

And the results were a bit medium.

While it was fun to chat with OwnBackup, Assembly, SimpleNexus and PicsArt, ultimately we were getting similar notes from each company: hiring is incredibly important as a company scales, founders have to cede decision-making, and as startups grow from $30 million ARR to $50 million or more, they must harden internal systems and build business infrastructure.

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

All that made sense, but it wasn’t entirely scintillating. I meant to keep the project going; I had publicly made noise about the effort and had a few interviews in the bag that were collecting dust (and emails from various PR folks).

But they wound up in the Google Docs graveyard as the news cycle somehow managed to keep accelerating, meaning that the time required to execute the somewhat effort-intensive series dried up as I held on for dear life as the early, middle, late and IPO-stage startup market stormed.

And so after some reflection, it’s time to admit defeat.

For now, I’m hitting pause on the $50 million ARR series and whatever might have come from the $100 million ARR legacy effort. I may bring it back at some point, but for now, there are just more pressing and interesting things to work on.

What follows is what I believe to be the remainder of my notes from interviews that never saw the light of day. So, one last time, let’s discuss some big startups that are scaling quickly: Appspace, Synack and Druva. We’ll proceed in alphabetical order.

Appspace

The Exchange caught up with Appspace a bit ago, chatting with a few of its executives, including CMO Scott Chao and CEO Brandon Miles. It’s an interesting company that sells a software platform that powers in-office displays and kiosks. You’ve seen office sign-in screens at a welcome desk, screens outside conference rooms showing how booked they are, or company messaging and the like on various large screens? That’s what Appspace’s software does.

And the company has an interesting vibe. Unlike nearly every other startup I’ve met, Appspace doesn’t think it is saving the world. In our chat, the company joked that its culture is to move quickly, but with the cognizance that they aren’t curing cancer.

Such modesty might feel odd, but it was actually refreshing. Appspace’s job is to white-label itself, let its customers speak to their workers through its various apps (including mobile) and services, and simply feature rock-solid uptime.

St. Louis-based voice assistant startup Disruptel is announcing that it has raised $1.1 million in seed funding.

The money comes from an impressive group of investors who seem well-aligned with what the startup is aiming to do — namely, build a voice assistant that can provide detailed information about what’s happening on your TV screen. Those investors include PJC and Progress Ventures (which led the round), along with DataXu co-founder and former CEO Mike Baker, Siri co-founder Adam Cheyer, Sky executive Andrew Olson and DataXu co-founder Bill Simmons.

Disruptel CEO Alex Quinn told me that he began to pursue the idea in high school — the initial idea was more focused on TV gesture controls, but he decided that there was a bigger opportunity in the fact that “smart TVs don’t know what’s going on on their own screen.”

So he said Disruptel has built technology that has “a contextual understanding of everything that’s happening on the screen — every product, all of that data.” So for example, you could use the technology to ask your TV, “Who is the person in the brown shirt?”

Quinn’s description reminded me of Amazon’s X-Ray technology, which can tell you about the actors on-screen, as well as additional trivia about whatever movie or TV you’re watching on Amazon Prime. But he said that Amazon’s solution (as well as a similar one from Google) involves “static data — the videos have all been pre-processed.” With Disruptel, on the other hand, “everything is happening in real time,” which means it could theoretically work with any piece of content.

Disruptel’s flagship product Context is a voice assistant designed to work with smart TVs and their remotes. Quinn said he’s hoping to partner with smart TV manufacturers and streaming services and get this into the hands of viewers in the second half of this year.

In the meantime, the company has already created a Smart Screen extension for Google Chrome that you can try right now (using the extension, I successfully identified the actors on-screen during multiple scenes of an episode of “The Flash”). Quinn said the company is using the extension as way to test the product and gather engagement data.

Baker (who sold his adtech company dataxu to Roku in 2019)  said that he was convinced to back the company after seeing a demo of the product: “It was interesting to see the power, the fluidity fo the experience.”

He also suggested that Disruptel’s tech creates new opportunities to improve on the smart TV advertising experience, which he described as largely consisting of “crap” — though he also pointed to Hulu as an example of a service that can be successful with “non-intrusive advertising and interstitial ads.”

Asked how a high school student could create this kind of technology, Quinn (who is now 21) said, “We had to learn. Our team is very focused on machine learning, and our machine learning engineers were reading research paper after research paper. We think that we have found the best research solutions.”

He added that if Disruptel had followed the leads of the big players and focused on pre-processing content, “We would never even have begun that journey.”

Workers at Amazon’s Bessemer, Alabama warehouse have already received public support from Democratic politicians ranging from Bernie Sanders to Joe Biden, the latter of whom promised to be “the most pro-union president you’ve ever seen,” late-last year. Now, as many look to unionize, the team is getting some political backing from a more unexpected place.

In an op-ed penned for USA Today, Marco Rubio threw support behind the workers, in spite of “dangers posed by the unchecked influence of labor unions.” The Florida Senator notes Republicans’ historical tendency of siding with management, but adds “the days of conservatives being taken for granted by the business community are over.”

The piece of hardly a full-throated embrace of labor unions in general, which have traditionally allied themselves with the political left. Rubio hedges slightly in the beginning noting that conflicts between unions and management “are wrong for both workers and our nation’s economic competitiveness,” but the politician cites “uniquely malicious corporate behavior.”

Rubio writes,

Here’s my standard: When the conflict is between working Americans and a company whose leadership has decided to wage culture war against working-class values, the choice is easy — I support the workers. And that’s why I stand with those at Amazon’s Bessemer warehouse today.

In addition to addressing long-standing complaints against Amazon workplace conditions, the piece embraces some long-standing Republican culture war complaints. “Today it might be workplace conditions,” he says, “but tomorrow it might be a requirement that the workers embrace management’s latest ‘woke’ human resources fad.”

Politics and labor relations, it seems, make strange bedfellows. Though while organizers have often been of the left, the goal of unions (however you may feel about them in practice) is the protect the conditions of workers, regardless of political affiliation.

A number of lawmakers have traveled to Alabama to show support for workers at the warehouse, including Cori Bush, Jamaal Bowman, Andy Levin, Terri Sewell and Nikema Williams. Workers at the warehouse, which employs around 6,000, kicked off a mail-in vote on February 7. The balloting ends later this month.

Ultimately, high profile support may be a net positive for workers when it comes to pressuring a company. Union organizers sometimes caution against taking too much stock in such comments, however.

Asked about Biden’s support in a recent conversation with TechCrunch, NYU fellow, Clarissa Redwine noted, “First and foremost, it’s really important to remember that the things that people in power say do not matter. All of the power that you have doesn’t come from people at the top giving it to you. It comes from linking arms with the people next to you and taking that power and influence for yourself.”

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

Natasha and Danny and Alex and Grace were all here to chat through the week’s biggest tech happenings. Like every week, we had to leave a lot of great stuff on the cutting-room floor. But, we did get to touch on a bunch of news that we feel really matters.

Also we do wind up talking about a few Extra Crunch pieces, which is where our deeper analysis on news items lives. If the paywall is a bother, you can get access while saving 50% with the code “EQUITY.”

Here’s what we got into:

• Crypto-art and the NFT boom continue. Check out what Beeple just did. Danny has an opinion on the matter.
• The Roblox direct-listing does very little actually solve the IPO pricing issue. That said, well done Bloxburg.
• We talked about the Coursera S-1, which gave us the first financial peek into an education company revitalized by the pandemic.
• The numbers needed context, so our follow up coverage gives readers 5 takeaways from the Coursera IPO.
• Language learning has a market, and it’s big. We talked about Preply’s $35 million raise and why tutoring marketplaces make sense.
• Dropbox is buying DocSend, which makes pretty good sense. Even if the exit price won’t matter much for bigger funds. We’re still witnessing Dropbox and Box add more features to their product via acquisitions. Let’s see how it impacts their revenue growth.
• Zapier buys Makerpad. We struggled to pronounce Zapier, but did have some notes on the deal and what it might mean for the no-code space.
• Sticking the acquisition theme, PayPal bought Curv. If you were looking for more evidence that big companies are taking crypto seriously, well, here it is.
• And to close we nerded out about Neeva. Can a Google-competitor take on Google if it was founded by ex-Googlers?

The show is back Monday morning. Stay cool!

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!

Yesterday, the European oil and gas major producer Shell announced the latest cohort selected to participate in its Shell GameChanger Accelerator (GCxN), focused on supporting companies developing tech for the transition away from fossil fuels.

The three companies will have access to technical resources through Shell that can serve to aid in their commercialization.

“GCxN’s fourth cohort will help prove that electrochemistry technologies can replace carbon-intensive legacy processes. As renewable energy costs continue to drop, cross-industry initiatives and partnerships will prove that it’s possible to cost-effectively scale these technology applications and achieve real-world impact,” said Haibin Xu, Shell’s GCxN program manager.

Shell’s acceleartor provides startups selected for the program with up to $250,000 in non-dilutive financing. Participants are nominated by network partners coming from incubators, accelerators, and universities and then are subjected to a screening process by Shell and NREL. 

Graduates of the program have raised $52 million in the three prevoius batches and have added 51 new jobs to the green economy, according to a statement.

Each of the new companies in the cohort are focused on creating ways to reduce carbon emissions in sectors that are carbon intensive and hard to transition to more sustainable practices, according to a statement. 

So without further ado, here’s the latest batch of startups backed by Shell:

• Air Company — This Brooklyn-based business is turning carbon dioxide into alcohols, spirits, fragrances, sanitizers and products for consumer industries. It eventually wants to get into the synthetic fuel business. 
• Ionomr Innovations — Green hydrogen production, hydrogen fuel cells and carbon capture technologies require ion-exchange membranes and polymers, and this Vancouver-based company wants to make those components cheaper and more environmentally friendly.  
• Versogen Hailing from President Joe Biden’s home state of Delaware, the company formerly known as W7 energy is producing high performance hydroxide exchange membranes to drive down the cost of fuel cells. 

“Almost every aspect of our modern lives depends on certain materials and fuels, but with great consequence. For example, the American manufacturing industry is on-track to become the nation’s largest source of greenhouse gas emissions within the next ten years,” said Katie Richardson, GCxN program manager at the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL), in a statement. “The selected GCxN startups are restructuring essential building blocks to reduce the carbon impact of essential goods and services.” 

It’s been two months since Donald Trump was kicked off of social media following the violent insurrection on Capitol Hill in January. While the constant barrage of hate-fueled commentary and disinformation from the former president has come to a halt, we must stay vigilant.

Now is the time to think about how to prevent Trump, his allies and other bad actors from fomenting extremism in the future. It’s time to figure out how we as a society address the misinformation, conspiracy theories and lies that threaten our democracy by destroying our information infrastructure.

As vice president at Color Of Change, my team and I have had countless meetings with leaders of multi-billion-dollar tech companies like Facebook, Twitter and Google, where we had to consistently flag hateful, racist content and disinformation on their platforms. We’ve also raised demands supported by millions of our members to adequately address these systemic issues — calls that are too often met with a lack of urgency and sense of responsibility to keep users and Black communities safe.

The violent insurrection by white nationalists and far-right extremists in our nation’s capital was absolutely fueled and enabled by tech companies who had years to address hate speech and disinformation that proliferated on their social media platforms. Many social media companies relinquished their platforms to far-right extremists, white supremacists and domestic terrorists long ago, and it will take more than an attempted coup to hold them fully accountable for their complicity in the erosion of our democracy — and to ensure it can’t happen again.

To restore our systems of knowledge-sharing and eliminate white nationalist organizing online, Big Tech must move beyond its typical reactive and shallow approach to addressing the harm they cause to our communities and our democracy. But it’s more clear than ever that the federal government must step in to ensure tech giants act.

After six years leading corporate accountability campaigns and engaging with Big Tech leaders, I can definitively say it’s evident that social media companies do have the power, resources and tools to enforce policies that protect our democracy and our communities. However, leaders at these tech giants have demonstrated time and time again that they will choose not to implement and enforce adequate measures to stem the dangerous misinformation, targeted hate and white nationalist organizing on their platforms if it means sacrificing maximum profit and growth.

And they use their massive PR teams to create an illusion that they’re sufficiently addressing these issues. For example, social media companies like Facebook continue to follow a reactive formula of announcing disparate policy changes in response to whatever public relations disaster they’re fending off at the moment. Before the insurrection, the company’s leaders failed to heed the warnings of advocates like Color Of Change about the dangers of white supremacists, far-right conspiracists and racist militias using their platforms to organize, recruit and incite violence. They did not ban Trump, implement stronger content moderation policies or change algorithms to stop the spread of misinformation-superspreader Facebook groups — as we had been recommending for years.

These threats were apparent long before the attack on Capitol Hill. They were obvious as Color Of Change and our allies propelled the #StopHateForProfit campaign last summer, when over 1,000 advertisers pulled millions in ad revenues from the platform. They were obvious when Facebook finally agreed to conduct a civil rights audit in 2018 after pressure from our organization and our members. They were obvious even before the deadly white nationalist demonstration in Charlottesville in 2017.

Only after significant damage had already been done did social media companies take action and concede to some of our most pressing demands, including the call to ban Trump’s accounts, implement disclaimers on voter fraud claims, and move aggressively remove COVID misinformation as well as posts inciting violence at the polls amid the 2020 election. But even now, these companies continue to shirk full responsibility by, for example, using self-created entities like the Facebook Oversight Board — an illegitimate substitute for adequate policy enforcement — as PR cover while the fate of recent decisions, such as the suspension of Trump’s account, hang in the balance.

Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and many other Big Tech companies kick into action when their profits, self-interests and reputation are threatened, but always after the damage has been done because their business models are built solely around maximizing engagement. The more polarized content is, the more engagement it gets; the more comments it elicits or times it’s shared, the more of our attention they command and can sell to advertisers. Big Tech leaders have demonstrated they neither have the willpower nor the ability to proactively and successfully self-regulate, and that’s why Congress must immediately intervene.

Congress should enact and enforce federal regulations to reign in the outsized power of Big Tech behemoths, and our lawmakers must create policies that translate to real-life changes in our everyday lives — policies that protect Black and other marginalized communities both online and offline.

We need stronger antitrust enforcement laws to break up big tech monopolies that evade corporate accountability and impact Black businesses and workers; comprehensive privacy and algorithmic discrimination legislation to ensure that profits from our data aren’t being used to fuel our exploitation; expanded broadband access to close the digital divide for Black and low-income communities; restored net neutrality so that internet services providers can’t charge differently based on content or equipment; and disinformation and content moderation by making it clear that Section 230 does not exempt platforms from complying with civil rights laws.

We’ve already seen some progress following pressure from activists and advocacy groups including Color Of Change. Last year alone, Big Tech companies like Zoom hired chief diversity experts; Google took action to block the Proud Boys website and online store; and major social media platforms like TikTok adopted better, stronger policies on banning hateful content.

But we’re not going to applaud billion-dollar tech companies for doing what they should and could have already done to address the years of misinformation, hate and violence fueled by social media platforms. We’re not going to wait for the next PR stunt or blanket statement to come out or until Facebook decides whether or not to reinstate Trump’s accounts — and we’re not going to stand idly by until more lives are lost.

The federal government and regulatory powers need to hold Big Tech accountable to their commitments by immediately enacting policy change. Our nation’s leaders have a responsibility to protect us from the harms Big Tech is enabling on our democracy and our communities — to regulate social media platforms and change the dangerous incentives in the digital economy. Without federal intervention, tech companies are on pace to repeat history.

Uber has had a good result against litigation in the Netherlands, where its European business is headquartered, that had alleged it uses algorithms to terminate drivers — but which the court has rejected.

The ride-hailing giant has also been largely successful in fending off wide-ranging requests for data from drivers wanting to obtain more of the personal data it holds on them.

A number of Uber drivers filed the suits last year with the support of the App Drivers & Couriers Union (ADCU) in part because they are seeking to port data held on them in Uber’s platform to a data trust (called Worker Info Exchange) that they want to set up, administered by a union, to further their ability to collectively bargain against the platform giant.

The court did not object to them seeking data, saying such a purpose does not stand in the way of exercising their personal data access rights, but it rejected most of their specific requests — at times saying they were too general or had not been sufficiently explained or must be balanced against other rights (such as passenger privacy).

The ruling hasn’t gone entirely Uber’s way, though, as the court ordered the tech giant to hand over a little more data to the litigating drivers than it has so far. While it rejected driver access to information including manual notes about them, tags and reports, Uber has been ordered to provide drivers with individual ratings given by riders on an anonymized basis — with the court giving it two months to comply.

In another win for Uber, the court did not find that its (automated) dispatch system results in a “legal or similarly significant effect” for drivers under EU law — and therefore has allowed that it be applied without additional human oversight.

The court also rejected a request by the applicants that data Uber does provide to them must be provided via a CSV file or API, finding that the PDF format Uber has provider is sufficient to comply with legal requirements.

In response to the judgements, an Uber spokesman sent us this statement:

“This is a crucial decision. The Court has confirmed Uber’s dispatch system does not equate to automated decision making, and that we provided drivers with the data they are entitled to. The Court also confirmed that Uber’s processes have meaningful human involvement. Safety is the number one priority on the Uber platform, so any account deactivation decision is taken extremely seriously with manual reviews by our specialist team.”

The ADCU said the litigation has established that drivers taking collective action to seek access to their data is not an abuse of data protection rights — and lauded the aspects of the judgement where Uber has been ordered to hand over more data.

It also said it sees potential grounds for appeal, saying it’s concerned that some aspects of the judgments unduly restrict the rights of drivers, which it said could interfere with the right of workers to access employment rights — “to the extent they are frustrated in their ability to validate the fare basis and compare earnings and operating costs”.

“We also feel the court has unduly put the burden of proof on workers to show they have been subject to automated decision making before they can demand transparency of such decision making,” it added in a press release. “Similarly, the court has required drivers to provide greater specificity on the personal data sought rather than placing the burden on firms like Uber and Ola to clearly explain what personal data is held and how it is processed.”

The two Court of Amsterdam judgements can be found here and here (both are in Dutch; we’ve used Google Translate for the sections quoted below).

Our earlier reports on the legal challenges can be found here and here.

The Amsterdam court has also ruled on similar litigation filed against India-based Ola last year — ordering the India-based ride-hailing company to hand over a wider array of data than it currently does; and also saying it must explain the main criteria for a ‘penalties and deductions’ algorithm that can be applied to drivers’ earnings.

The judgement is available here (in Dutch). See below for more details on the Ola judgement.

Commenting in a statement, James Farrar, a former Uber driver who is now director of the aforementioned Worker Info Exchange, said: “This judgment is a giant leap forward in the struggle for workers to hold platform employers like Uber and Ola Cabs accountable for opaque and unfair automated management practices. Uber and Ola Cabs have been ordered to make transparent the basis for unfair dismissals, wage deductions and the use of surveillance systems such as Ola’s Guardian system and Uber’s Real Time ID system. The court completely rejected Uber & Ola’s arguments against the right of workers to collectively organize their data and establish a data trust with Worker Info Exchange as an abuse of data access rights.”

In an interesting (related) development in Spain, which we reported on yesterday, the government there has said it will legislate in a reform of the labor law aimed at delivery platforms that will require them to provide workers’ legal representatives with information on the rules of any algorithms that manage and assess them.

Court did not find Uber does ‘robo firings’

In one of the lawsuits, the applicants had argued that Uber had infringed their right not to be subject to automated decision-making when it terminated their driver accounts and also that it has not complied with its transparency obligations (within the meaning of GDPR Articles 13, 14 and 15).

Article 22 GDPR gives EU citizens the right not to be subject to a decision based solely on automated processing (including profiling) where the decision has legal or otherwise significant consequences for them. There must be meaningful human interaction in the decision-making process for it to not be considered solely automated processing.

Uber argued that it does not carry out automated terminations of drivers in the region and therefore that the law does not apply — telling the court that potential fraudulent activities are investigated by a specialized team of Uber employees (aka the ‘EMEA Operational Risk team’).

And while it said that the team makes use of software with which potential fraudulent activities can be detected, investigations are carried out by employees following internal protocols which require them to analyze potential fraud signals and the “facts and circumstances” to confirm or rule out the existence of fraud.

Uber said that if a consistent pattern of fraud is detected, a decision to terminate requires an unanimous decision from two employees of the Risk team. When the two employees do not agree, Uber says a third conducts an investigation — presumably to cast a deciding vote.

It provided the court with explanations for each of the terminations of the litigating applicants — and the court writes that Uber’s explanations of its decision-making process for terminations were not disputed. “In the absence of evidence to the contrary, the court will assume that the explanation provided by Uber is correct,” it wrote.

Interestingly, in the case of one of the applicants, Uber told the court they had been using (unidentified) software to manipulate the Uber Driver app in order to identify more expensive journeys by being able to view the passenger’s destination before accepting the ride — enabling them to cherry pick jobs, a practice that’s against Uber’s terms. Uber said the driver was warned that if they used the software again they would be terminated. But a few days later they did so — leading to another investigation and a termination.

However it’s worth noting that the activity in question dates back to 2018. And Uber has since changed how its service operates to provide drivers with information about the destination before they accept a ride — a change it flagged in response to a recent UK Supreme Court ruling that confirmed drivers who brought the challenge are workers, not self employed.

Some transparency issues were found

On the associated question of whether Uber had violated its transparency obligations to terminated drivers, the court found that in the cases of two of the four applicants Uber had done so (but not for the other two).

“Uber did not clarify which specific fraudulent acts resulted in their accounts being deactivated,” the court writes in the case of the two applicants who it found had not been provided with sufficient information related to their terminations. “Based on the information provided by Uber, they cannot check which personal data Uber used in the decision-making process that led to this decision. As a result, the decision to deactivate their accounts is insufficiently transparent and verifiable. As a result, Uber must provide [applicant 2] and [applicant 4] with access to their personal data pursuant to Article 15 of the GDPR insofar as they were the basis for the decision to deactivate their accounts, in such a way that they can are able to verify the correctness and lawfulness of the processing of their personal data.”

The court dismissed Uber’s attempt to evade disclosure on the grounds that providing more information would give the drivers insight into its anti-fraud detection systems which it suggested could then be used to circumvent them, writing: “In this state of affairs, Uber’s interest in refusing access to the processed personal data of [applicant 2] and [applicant 4] cannot outweigh the right of [applicant 2] and [applicant 4] to access their personal data.”

Compensation claims related to the charges were rejected — including in the case of the two applicants who were not provided with sufficient data on their terminations, with the court saying that they had not provided “reasons for damage to their humanity or good name or damage to their person in any other way”.

The court has given Uber two months to provide the two applicants with personal data pertaining to their terminations. No penalty has been ordered.

“For the time being, the trust is justified that Uber will voluntarily comply with the order for inspection [of personal data] and will endeavor to provide the relevant personal data,” it adds.

No legal/significant effect from Uber’s aIgo-dispatch

From the point of view of a consumer, customer service sometimes feels like a monolith, but behind the scenes it can be a very fragmented business, with dozens of companies providing various different tools to help agents do their jobs.

Today, a startup founded by three Stripe alums that has set out to build a platform that helps organizations manage that spaghetti of customer service IT, and use it more efficiently, is announcing a round of funding to continue growing its business.

Assembled, which has built a platform that it describes as the “operating system” for support teams, has raised $16.6 million, a Series A that it plans to use to continue expanding its team and platform, and to bring on more customers.

The round is being led by Emergence Capital, the VC that specializes in enterprise startups, backing other communications-centric companies in its time like Salesforce, Zoom, Yammer, ServiceMax, SalesLoft and Lithium. Stripe, Basis Set Ventures and Felicis Ventures also participated. Stripe has a strong connection to Assembled. It is a customer. It led Assembled’s $3.1 million seed round a year ago.

And, it was the company where the three co-founders met and built the earliest version of the product it offers today. CEO Brian Sze was one of the first employees, overseeing business operations, where he built the customer support platform that inspired him to eventually leave to found Assembled. His two co-founders, brothers Ryan and John Wang, were engineers at the payments and financial services behemoth.

Assembled’s current platform is priced in tiers starting at $15 per agent per month. Integrating with Salesforce, Zendesk, Intercom, Kustomer, Gladly and other services by way of API integrations, it provides not just a way to manage and view customer support data from different sources in one place, but alongside that it provides tools focused on the support teams themselves. This includes tools to manage and roster teams, analyze team performance, and forecast demand depending on different factors in order to be better prepared.

As with all other aspects of how organizations work, customer service and people management are being digitally transformed. Typically, Sze said that many companies still use spreadsheets to manage and plan customer support rosters. That is now gradually shifting into what he describes as “support ops” where a strategic person is tasked not just with handling what is happening with incoming customer support right now, but also needs to figure out what will happen in the next year, and the tools that might help cope with that. “That is our emergent buyer,” Sze said.

“The sheer number of channels being supported is much bigger, when you consider email, messaging, phone lines, social media and more,” said Sze, adding that the pandemic had a particularly strong effect on Assembled’s business. It saw a big bump in especially in Q3 of last year, when its customer base doubled. “I think it came down to support being one of the most critical teams at the organization.”

Assembled today has a number of tech companies, and tech-first consumer companies as customers, including Stripe, GoFundMe, challenger bank Monzo, Google-owned Looker, D2C clothing brand Everlane and Harrys. It has grown customers five-fold in the last year, said Sze, while revenues have grown 300% (absolute numbers for both were not disclosed).

The concept of an “operating system” for customer support makes a lot of sense when you think about how the role has evolved over the years.

In the decades before the internet and digital interactions became the norm, support either focused on in-person visits, or phone-based interactions where you might find yourself calling toll-free numbers, sitting on hold for a long time, maybe being shuffled from one person to another depending on the nature of your issue.

Over time, those systems picked up some automated responses and companies started getting better systems in place to triage those calls. Then, as marketing became “marketing tech” and sales took on a software life of its own, those customer support people started to pick up more responsibilities, not just listening to customers but turning around and offering to sell them things, too, or take stock of customer satisfaction and overall sentiment. Then more channels for connecting came with the internet. Then came more efficient tools, cloud-based services, mobile services, and more to handle all of the above, and so on.

All of these iterations often came with different pieces of software, and while some companies have set out to build one-stop shops to take everything on, Assembled takes a Slack-like approach, making it easy to bring in data and manage different tools from one place, providing a place to bring them all together to help them work more harmoniously. At the same time, it provides a way to manage the teams of people who are there to work with those pieces of software. This is because, when it comes to customer support, it’s always as much about the teams running it as it is the software they are using (hence: “assmebled”).

The company’s approach has been especially relevant in the last year. Not only have teams — including customer service teams — been forced to work remotely, but they have generally seen a surge of traffic from customers who are going online for all of their services, and using digital tools when they need to get in touch with organizations. Still, the opportunity for Assembled is that by and large, there are still a large proportion of businesses that are still playing catch up here.

“Today’s customer support teams operate in a dynamic, increasingly remote environment vastly different from that of a decade ago,” said Jake Saper, Emergence General Partner, in a statement. “But it’s shocking to learn how many support teams are still operating out of spreadsheets. At Emergence, we believe that Support Ops will become a critical complement to support teams, much like DevOps has become for developers. Having initially built their product to manage Stripe’s support function, we believe the Assembled team is the world’s best to build the core operating platform for Support Ops.”

Valuation is not being disclosed.

For the last few years, ByteDance, the parent company of short video app TikTok, has been working to diversify its revenue streams beyond advertisement and find more ways to monetize its hundreds of millions of users. One area it is targeting is gaming, which has historically been a lucrative business in China’s internet economy.

China is the world’s largest gaming market, generating revenues of $40.85 billion in 2020, according to market research firm Newzoo. The United States trailed behind at $36.92 billion.

But competition is also intense. Giants Tencent and NetEase have long dominated and smaller players like Mihoyo and Lilith are making breakthroughs. According to market research firm Analysys, Tencent occupied over half of the Chinese gaming market in 2019, while NetEase and 37 Interactive respectively commanded around 16% and 10%, leaving little breathing room for smaller rivals.

Regardless, ByteDance is forging ahead, giving a brand name, Nuversegame, and a website to its gaming business for the first time last month. Its strategy consists of a genre-spanning portfolio, a hiring spree, a proven monetization scheme, and a focus on both the domestic and overseas markets. During his short-lived stint with ByteDance, Kevin Meyer was put in charge of multiple overseas businesses, including gaming.

ByteDance, the David when it comes to games, seems undeterred by the Goliaths. As one of the company’s gaming executives Yan Shou wrote in a social media post a year ago: “Gaming is a content business. A monopoly is difficult to maintain [in this industry] as long as there is patience.”

Battle for talent

In recent years, ByteDance has hired a large number of ex-employees from the BAT, the acronym for three of the most prominent tech firms in China: Baidu, Alibaba, and Tencent. Yan himself worked on strategy at Tencent for over two years before joining ByteDance in 2015. While poaching and job-hopping are common in China’s fast-changing tech industry, ByteDance is known for doling out generous paychecks and many tech workers are lured by the prospects of receiving employee options before the firm goes public someday.

Ambitious staff may also feel stagnant after a long period at Alibaba and Tencent, which are both over 20 years old and where room for career advancement is limited. ByteDance, in comparison, is merely nine years old and is still in a fast-growth phase, a Beijing-based headhunter for technology firms tells TechCrunch.

“The current stage of ByteDance and the new businesses it is incubating provide the right platform for these people to achieve their ambitions,” the headhunter says.

In gaming, too, ByteDance has gone on a recruiting spree. The company’s gaming headcount numbers nearly 3,000 today, up from only 1,000 last year, according to a person with knowledge. These employees are scattered across China’s major tech hubs, from Beijing, Shanghai, Hangzhou to Shenzhen, working in various gaming studios under ByteDance.

How big is a 3,000-person team? 37 Interactive, the third-largest gaming firm in China, had around 4,000 gaming staff as of January, according to a company executive. It took the company 10 years to reach this scale. ByteDance began exploring games only around five years ago.

ByteDance declined to comment on the story.

Factory of games

Being late to the game could bring advantages. Having seen how Tencent and other predecessors tackle the gaming market allows ByteDance to learn. For one, ByteDance is working on a diverse range of genres simultaneously, from disposable mobile games to indie titles with unorthodox design or topics. This makes ByteDance different from Tencent, says Daniel Ahmad, a gaming analyst at Niko Partners. Tencent, the world’s largest gaming firm, cut its teeth on board and card games in the 2000s before gradually expanding into other genres.

Of course, only a deep-pocketed upstart like ByteDance could strive for a diverse portfolio from day one. With a well-oiled advertising business built upon its short video app Douyin and news aggregator Toutiao, as well as over $7 billion raised from equity funding over the years, ByteDance has been able to fund its horizontal expansions in not just games but also education and SaaS.

Aside from hunting down talent from other tech giants, ByteDance also relies on swallowing smaller companies to boost its workforce. Since 2018, ByteDance has invested in at least 11 gaming companies, six of which were full acquisitions, according to public disclosures. The acquired assets and talent were subsequently incorporated into ByteDance’s gaming studios. Acqui-hiring is an old and proven formula at ByteDance. Kelly Zhang, the product manager credited for taking Douyin, the Chinese version of TikTok, off the ground, also joined after her photo-sharing startup was bought by ByteDance.

Like many gaming firms, ByteDance’s monetization scheme is two-pronged: distribution of third-party titles and original creation. Quality games don’t come overnight, so the strategy allows its gaming unit to have some revenue as it bets on one of its own works to be a cash cow. Casual games are great for ads, which are normally placed between levels. More complex games rely on user loyalty and the natural way to make money is through in-app purchases.

A number of ByteDance’s licensed casual games have so far made it into the Top 10 iOS free games in China, including car racing game Drift Race, music game Yinyue Qiuqiu, and puzzle game Brain Out. While these collaborations don’t make big bucks yet, the initial traction proves the viability of ByteDance’s traffic strategy.

ByteDance said in 2019 it had 1.5 billion monthly users across its app family (there can be user overlap between apps). One way ByteDance is marketing games is by inserting native ads into users’ content feeds. Videos, says Niko Partners’ Ahmad, are “interactive, easy to use, easy to click through and can get much higher conversion than traditional ads.”

In some cases, the ad may prompt users to download a standalone gaming app. But like WeChat and most of China’s popular apps,  Douyin and Toutiao support third-party “mini apps” within their own platforms. Users can, for instance, play a lite game on Douyin just as they can on WeChat.

With hundreds of millions of monthly users, ByteDance already has a good grasp of people’s tastes and behavior, so it knows what games to recommend. In theory, the more people see and react, the more accurate its predictions become.

“Through targeted ‘recommendations’, our ‘algorithms’ will automatically show users mini games presented in various forms,” explains ByteDance’s gaming developer handbook. “All games have a fair and equal chance of getting initial exposure.”