Author: azeeadmin

Advances in technology provide all kinds of benefits, but also introduce risks — especially to already marginalized populations. AI for the People’s Mutale Nkonde, disability rights lawyer Haben Girma, and author of Algorithms of Oppression Safiya Umoja Noble have studied and documented these risks for years in their work. They joined us at TC Sessions: Justice 2021 to talk about the deep origins and repercussions of bias in tech, and where to start when it comes to fixing them.

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On bias in tech versus bias in people

When it comes to identifying bias in tech, there are two ways of coming at it: the tech itself and the people who are putting it to work. A facial recognition system may be be racist itself (such as working poorly with dark skin) or used in furtherance of racist policies (like stop and frisk).

Nkonde: There is the problem of technologies which are inherently racist, or sexist, or ableist, as Haben so beautifully pointed out. But there is another part… an imagination for technologies that could actually serve all people. And if the if the scientists who are creating those technologies don’t have experience outside of their own experiences, and we’re sitting in a moment where Google AI has got rid of [Margaret] Mitchell and Timnit Gebru, both of whom were technologists from, researchers from, minoritized communities who are thinking about new and different ways that tools could be designed… then you may not see them coming to products. I’d say that the two are definitely married. (Timestamp: 3:00)

• Twitter and Zoom’s algorithmic bias issues
• Google fires top AI ethics researcher Margaret Mitchell
• What’s next for Dr. Timnit Gebru

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On the danger in ‘banal’ technologies

Bias does not only exist in controversial tech like facial recognition. Search engines, algorithmic news feeds, and other things we tend to take for granted also can contain harmful biases or contribute to them.

Noble: My concerns were with what we might think of as just banal technologies, things that we really don’t give a second thought to, and that also present themselves as widely neutral, and valuable. Of course this is where I became interested in looking at Google search, because Google’s own kind of declaration that they were interested in organizing all the world’s knowledge, I think was a pretty big claim. I’m coming out of the field of Library and Information Science and thinking about, I don’t know, thousands of years of librarians, for example, around the world, who have been indeed organizing the world’s knowledge, and what it means to have an advertising company, quite frankly, data mine our knowledge, but also commingle it with things like disinformation, propaganda, patently false information and ideas, and really flatten our ability to understand knowledge and good information. (Timestamp: 5:13)

• Google’s latest user-hostile design change makes ads and search results look identical
• Google threatens to close its search engine in Australia as it lobbies against digital news code

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On how excluding groups harms them twice over

Haben Girma, who is deaf and blind, has advocated for accessibility with the skills she learned at Harvard Law. But the lack of accessibility goes deeper than simply not captioning images properly and other small tasks.

Girma: So most of the technology that’s built was not imagined for disabled people, which is frustrating… and also absolutely ridiculous. Tech has so much potential to exist in visual forms, in auditory forms, in tactile forms, and even smell and taste. It’s up to the designers to create tools that everyone can use. (Timestamp: 0:56)

A disturbing viral trend on TikTok recently questioned the story of deafblind icon Helen Keller. Doubt that she existed as described or did the things she did was widespread on the platform — and because TikTok is not designed for accessibility, others like Keller are excluded from the conversation and effectively erased from consideration in addition to being the subject of false claims.

Girma: Deafblind people have used technology for quite a while, and were early users of technology, including being designers and engineers. We are on many of the social media platforms, there are blind and deaf blind people on Twitter. TikTok was not designed with accessibility in mind.

When you have a space where there are few disabled people, ableism grows. People on TikTok have questioned the existence of Helen Keller, because the people on the platform can’t imagine how a deafblind person would write a book, or travel around the world. Things that are well documented that Helen Keller did. And there’s also lots of information on how blind and deaf blind people are doing these things today, writing books today, using technology today. So when you have these spaces where there are no disabled people, or very few disabled people, ableism and negative biases grow more rapidly. And that’s incredibly harmful, because the people there are missing out on talented, diverse voices. (Timestamp: 12:16)

• White House, dark mode: Biden admin refreshes presidency’s website, vows accessibility
• Evinced raises $17M to speed up accessibility testing for the web

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On tech deployed against black communities

The flip side of racism within tech is ordinary tech being used by racist institutions. When law enforcement employs “objective” technology like license plate readers or biometric checks, they bring their own systematic biases and troubling objectives.

Nkonde: One of the things that that really brought me to was this whole host of technologies that when used by security forces, or police, reinforce these discriminatory impacts on black communities. So that could be the way license plate readers were used by ICE to identify cars, and when they pulled people over, they would do these additional biometric checks, whether it was fingerprinting or iris readers, and then use that to criminalize these people onto the road to deportation. (Timestamp: 17:16)

And when the two forms of bias are combined, certain groups are put at serious disadvantage:

Nkonde: We’re seeing how all of these technologies on their own, are impacting black lives, but imagine when all of those technologies are together, imagine when, here in New York, I walked to the subway to take a train because I have to go to work. And my face is captured by a CCTV camera that could wrongly put me at the scene of a crime because it does not recognize my humanity, because black faces are not recognized by those systems. That’s a very old idea that really takes us back to this idea that black people aren’t human, they’re in fact three fifths of a human, which was at the founding of this country, right? But we’re reproducing that idea through technology. (Timestamp: 19:00)

• For Seattle’s cop-free protest zone, tech is both a revolutionary asset and disastrous liability
• Racial disparity in Chicago cops’ use of force laid bare in new data

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On the business consequences of failing to address bias and diversity

While companies should be trying to do the right thing, it may help speed things up if there’s a financial incentive as well. And increasingly there is real liability resulting from failing to consider these problems. For instance, if your company produces an AI solution that’s found to be seriously biased, you not only lose business but may find yourself the subject of civil and government lawsuits.

Noble: I think that first of all, there’s a tremendous amount of risk by not taking up these issues. I’ve heard that the risk management profile, for example for a company like Facebook, in terms of harm, what they can’t solve with software and AI, that they use human beings, quite frankly to sort through, for example, the risk that they face is probably estimated around $2 billion, right?

If you’re talking about a $2 billion risk, I think then this is a decision that exceeds the design desires and software engineers. (Timestamp 24:25)

Not just bias but unintended consequences need to be considered, such as how an app or service may be abused in ways the creators might not have thought of.

Noble: I think you have to think far beyond, you know, like, what you can do versus what you should do, or what’s ethical and responsible to do and I think these conversations now can no longer be avoided. This is a place where founders, venture capitalists, everything, every VC in the Valley on Sandhill road should have a person who is responsible for thinking about the adverse effects of the products that they might invest in. (Timestamp: 25:43)

• DE&I at Facebook, Prop 22 and gig worker earnings
• Facebook fined again in Italy for misleading users over what it does with their data

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On getting people in the room before, not after the crisis

The tendency to “ship it and fix it” rather than include accessibility from the ground up is increasingly being questioned by both advocates and developers. Turns out it’s better for everyone, and cheaper in the long run, to do it right the first time.

Girma: The answer to most of these questions is have the people involved. ‘Nothing about us without us’ is the saying in the Disability Justice Movement, so if these seas and companies are thinking about investing in a solution that they think will be good for the world? Ask disability justice advocates, get us involved. (Timestamp: 29:25)

We need the VCs to also connect with Disability Justice advocates, and really find someone who has knowledge and background in accessibility and tech. Same thing for any company. All the companies should have, technology existing and tech in the process of being built, should be consulting on accessibility. It’s easier to make something accessible if you design for accessibility, rather than trying to make it accessible afterwards. It’s like having an elevator in a physical building. You don’t build the structure, and then think about adding an elevator. You think about adding an elevator before you design it. (Timestamp: 30:55)

• Microsoft offers new accessibility testing service for PC and Xbox games
• Fable aims to make disability-inclusive design as simple as a service

Read the full transcript here.

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On the heels of a heated standoff between platforms and publishers in Australia, U.S. lawmakers reintroduced a piece of legislation that would allow the news industry to collectively negotiate content deals with tech companies.

The Journalism Competition and Preservation Act is sponsored in the Senate by Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) and John Kennedy (R-LA) and in the House by David Cicilline (D-RI), Ken Buck (R-NY) and Mark DeSaulnier (D-CA.). The legislation was first introduced in 2019, but the bipartisan cluster of lawmakers hope to breathe new life into it during the Biden era.

The bill would create an exemption from existing antitrust laws that would allow news organizations to collectively negotiate favorable terms with tech companies like Facebook and Google. That special treatment would open a 48-month window for publishers, in theory boosting their leverage to better the industry as a whole.

The U.S. isn’t the only country grappling with tech platforms’ publishing dominance. Last month, Facebook dramatically pulled links to news content in Australia as it pushed back against new regulations that could force tech platforms to pay for more content. Specifically, Facebook objected to a final arbitration clause that would set the price for news automatically if tech platforms and news publishers couldn’t agree on terms.

“We must enable news organizations to negotiate on a level playing field with the big tech companies if we want to preserve a strong and independent press,” Sen. Klobuchar said of the bill, which she argues would give publishers a “fighting chance” in dealing with tech platforms.

“A strong, diverse, free press is critical for any successful democracy,” Rep. Cicilline said. “Access to trustworthy local journalism helps inform the public, hold powerful people accountable, and root out corruption.”

Both Cicilline and Klobuchar sit in powerful positions, chairing the House and Senate’s respective antitrust subcommittees. In the coming months, those committees will play a major role in shaping legislative proposals that could rein in big tech’s many excesses. Balancing the power of colossal tech platforms against the priorities of a shrinking news industry is just one piece of that puzzle.

The wave of shared electric scooters that swept through cities several years ago helped Populus AI get its start. Now, surging demand for delivery — and the pressure it places on curb space — is helping the transportation data startup attract new capital and expand to more cities.

Populus, a San Francisco-based startup founded in 2017, has raised $5 million from new investors Storm Ventures and contract manufacturing and supplier company Magna along with existing backers Precursor, Relay Ventures and Ulu Ventures. The company has raised nearly $9 million to date.

Populus plans to use that capital to expand to more cities, growth that the company believes will be driven by demand for street and curb management. Populus has contracts with more than 80 cities, including Oakland, San Diego, and Tel Aviv, and works with more than 25 micromobility operators. Co-founder and CEO Regina Clewlow said their aim is to triple the number of cities over the next 18 months.

The Populus platform is a software as a service product that operates like a two-way street. The company pulls data from fleets of shared ebikes, scooters, mopeds and car-sharing and delivers that information to cities to help planners and regulators understand and manage how streets and curbs are used. Cities can also use the Populus API to share its rules of the road — restrictions on motorized vehicles, preferred scooter parking areas and information on bike lanes, for instance — to mapping platforms and any other third party.

“In recent years, there has been significant growth in venture-backed startups delivering software to cities, especially as transportation becomes increasingly connected and automated,” Frederik Groce, a partner at Storm Ventures and founder of BLCK VC said in a statement “Populus is uniquely positioned as the market leader to support cities’ digital transformation.”

Last year, Populus added a street manager to the platform to allow cities to communicate new policies such as slow or shared streets that prioritize bikes and pedestrians, areas designated for outdoor dining and construction closures.

The curb management feature, which was also added last year, will be the main driver of growth in 2021, Clewlow said. Cities can use that data to set dynamic pricing for curb space, for example.

“What most cities really want to use our digital technology for is managing commercial fleets including delivery,” Clewlow said. Curb space is being used by both scheduled and on-demand vehicles, she said, adding that these areas are not designed for the volume of deliveries that occur today.

“Cities are continuing to see a boom in delivery; that’s a trend that predated COVID and obviously accelerated during COVID,” Clewlow said. “A real pain point for cities is managing how that space is used by commercial delivery vehicles.”

Adobe has been moving quickly to update its imaging software to work natively on Apple’s new in-house processors for Macs, starting with the M1-based MacBook Pro and MacBook Air released late last year. After shipping native versions of Lightroom and Camera Raw, it’s now releasing an Apple Silicon-optimized version of Photoshop, which delivers big performance gain vs. the Intel version running on Apple’s Rosetta 2 software emulation layer.

How much better? Per internal testing, Adobe says that users should see improvements of up to 1.5x faster performance on a number of different features offered by Photoshop, vs. the same tasks being done on the emulated version. That’s just the start, however, since Adobe says it’s going to continue to coax additional performance improvements out of the software on Apple Silicon in collaboration with Apple over time. Some features are also still missing from the M1-friendly addition, including the ‘Invite to Edit Cloud Documents’ and ‘Preset Syncing’ options, but those will be ported over in future iterations as well.

In addition to the Apple Silicon version of Photoshop, Adobe is also releasing a new Super Resolution feature in the Camera Raw plugin (to be released for Lightroom later) that ships with the software. This is an image enlarging feature that uses machine learning trained on a massive image dataset to blow up pictures to larger sizes while still preserving details. Adobe has previously offered a super resolution option that combined multiple exposures to boost resolution, but this works from a single photo.

It’s the classic ‘Computer, enhance’ sci-fi feature made real, and it builds on work that Photoshop previously did to introduce its ‘Enhance details’ feature. If you’re not a strict Adobe loyalist, you might also be familiar with Pixelmator Pro’s ‘ML Super Resolution’ feature, which works in much the same way – albeit using a different ML model and training data set.

The bottom line is that Adobe’s Super Resolution will output an image with twice the horizontal and twice the vertical resolution – meaning in total, it has 4x the number of pixels. It’ll do that while preserving detail and sharpness, which adds up to allowing you to make larger prints from images that previously wouldn’t stand up to that kind of enlargement. It’s also great for cropping in on photos in your collection to capture tighter shots of elements that previously would’ve been rendered blurry and disappointing as a result.

This feature benefits greatly from GPUs that are optimized for machine learning jobs, including CoreML and Windows ML. That means that Apple’s M1 chip is a perfect fit, since it includes a dedicated ML processing region called the Neural Engine. Likewise, Nvidia’s RTX series of GPUs and their TensorCores are well-suited to the task.

Adobe also released some major updates for Photoshop for iPad, including version history for its Cloud Documents non-local storage. You can also now store versions of Cloud Documents offline and edit them locally on your device.

Israel’s retrain.ai, which uses AI and Machine Learning to read job boards at scale and to gain insight into where the job market is going, has closed $9M Series A led by Square Peg. Since retrain.ai’s $4M seed round last year was unannounced (led by Hetz Ventures, with TechAviv and .406 Ventures participating) that means it’s raised a total of $13 million. It’s competitors include Pymetrics which has raised $56.6M and Eightfold.ai which has raised $176.8M.

As well as the funding, the company has secured a first deal with the Israeli Department of Labor to look at the changing nature of the Israeli job market in light of the pandemic.

With technology eating into the traditional labour market, retrain.ai says its platform can look at what jobs are being advertised, which jobs are going down in popularity and see early-warning signals as to where new jobs are going to appear from. This can help form policy for large organiations and governments.

retrain.ai’s CEO is Dr. Shay David, who is best known for co-founding the video enterprise leader Kaltura, which first appeared at TehcCrunch’s first ever conference in 2007. Isabelle Bichler-Eliasaf is the company’s COO and Avi Simon, is retrain.ai’s CTO.

Dr. Shay David said: “What was once the regular tide of change in the workforce has evolved into a tsunami, especially pronounced by COVID-19 and its huge impact on the labor market– this has been a wake-up call. Unemployment and underemployment  is going to affect a billion people globally in the next few decades. Our vision is to help 10 million workers get the right jobs by 2025 and help organizations navigate efficiently through the wave of change.”
 
retrain.ai is the first investment by Square Peg’s new $450M fund. The VC previously invested in Canva, Stripe, Fiverr and Airwallex.

On the heels of last week’s launch of a new Q&A format for creators responding to viewer questions, TikTok today announced it’s rolling out new commenting features. Creators will now be able to control which comments can be posted on their content, before those comments go live. Another new addition, aimed at users who are commenting, will pop up a box that prompts the user to reconsider posting a comment that may be inappropriate or unkind.

TikTok says the goal with the new features is to maintain a supportive, positive environment where people can focus on being creative and finding community.

Instead of reactively removing offensive comments, creators who choose to use the new “Filter All Comments” feature will instead get to choose which comments appear on their videos. When enabled, they’ll need to go through each comment individually to approve them using a new comment management tool.

This feature builds on TikTok’s existing comment controls, which allow creators to filter spam and other offensive comments or filter by keywords, similar to other social apps like Instagram.

But Filter All Comments means comments won’t even go live at all unless the creator approves them. This gives creators full control over their presence on the platform and could prevent bullying and abuse. But it also could allow creators to get away with spreading false information without any pushback, or making it seem like they’re more well liked than they actually are.

The other feature will instead push users to reconsider posting bad comments, meaning those that appear to be bullying or inappropriate. It will also remind users of TikTok’s Community Guidelines and allows them to edit their comments before sharing.

These sort of “nudges” help by slowing people down and giving them time to pause and think about what they’re saying, instead of being quick to react. Already, TikTok is using nudges to ask users whether or not they want to share unsubstantiated claims that fact checkers can’t verify, in an attempt to slow the spread of misinformation.

It has taken other social networks years to add prompts that ask users to stop and think before posting. Twitter, for example, just last month said it was running another test that asks users to reconsider harmful replies. It’s been running variations of this same test for nearly a year.

TikTok says it’s consulting with industry partners in developing its new policies and features, and today also announced a partnership with the Cyberbullying Research Center (CRC), which develops research around cyberbullying and online abuse and misuse. The company says it will collaborate with CRC to develop other initiatives going forward to help promote a positive environment.

 

Tetrate, the company commercializing an open source networking project that allows for easier data sharing across different applications, has raised $40 million.

The round, led by Sapphire Ventures underscores the importance of the Istio project and just how critical services that facilitate cross-platform data sharing have become.

Sapphire was joined by other new investors including Scale Venture Partners and NTTVC, along with existing investors, Dell Technologies Capital, Intel Capital, 8VC, and Samsung NEXT.

The company said it would use the cash to further develop its hybrid cloud application networking platform and support a new product, based on Istio, that makes the application service mesh easier to use, according to a statement from the company. Geographic expansion to Latin America, Europe and Asia is also on the menu now that it has 40 million simoleons to play around with (personally I’d have converted all that money into bills and gone swimming in it like Scrooge McDuck).

“As the microservices revolution picks up steam, it’s indispensable to use Istio for managing applications built with microservices and deployed on containers. Both the product and background of the founding team lead us to believe that Tetrate is poised to bring Istio into the mainstream for enterprises by making it easy to manage and deploy on multi-cloud and hybrid cloud environments,” said Jai Das, the partner, president and co-founder of Sapphire’s multi-billion dollar firm, who’s joining the Tetrate board. “The applications we use daily require a lot of work in the background, and Tetrate helps make that happen with its Istio-based service mesh technology, which helps route traffic between microservices, add visibility and enhance security.”

Founded in 2018, Tetrate formally launched in 2019 with a $12.5 million round that boosted the company’s profile and helped the company commercialize and professionalize services around the Istio and Envoy Proxy open source projects.

Tons of really big customers, including the U.S. Department of Defense use Tetrate’s services currently. In the military, Tetrate powers the DevSecOps platform called Platform One.

“We partnered with Tetrate to help secure and smoothly operate Platform One with Istio. Platform One works with the most critical systems across the DoD. The Tetrate team has provided world class expertise, trained our team members, reviewed our platform architecture and configurations, and helped with debugging and upgrades,” said Nicolas Chaillan, the chief software officer for the US Air Force, in a statement. “We’re getting excellent production support for running our platform smoothly and we rely on them and their platform for a critical layer of our stack.”

Julia Collins is the first Black woman to co-found a unicorn in the form of Zume, a robotics company that cooked pizzas and delivered them at the same time. The company attracted investment from Softbank and was valued at a reported $2.25 billion in 2019, but ultimately didn’t live up to expectations.

Collins is now on to her next venture in the form of Planet FWD, which has attracted funding from a number of investors including BBG Ventures, Emerson Capital and Cleo Capital.

Today, on Extra Crunch Live, we’ll sit down with Collins and Cleo Capital’s Sarah Kunst. We’ll chat about what was learned from Zume and how that is shaping Planet FWD, as well as Kunst’s interest in sustainability startups and why she bet on Collins. We’ll also talk about how founders can make the most of their pitch meetings, particularly in this virtual environment, and how to work with their investors and board members once they’ve landed the capital.

As with every episode of Extra Crunch Live, Kunst and Collins will give live feedback on pitch decks submitted by the audience in the Pitch Deck Teardown. If you want to share your pitch deck and get feedback from our experts on a future show, you can submit your deck here.

There is, however, one change to today’s show.

Extra Crunch members have always (and will always) had free access to Extra Crunch Live, both live and on demand. But today, we’ll also be selling tickets a la carte to the show. That’s right! Anyone can come hang out, ask their own questions to Collins and Kunst, and learn a thing or two from the seasoned experts.

The episode airs at 12pm PT/3pm ET today and will go for an hour.

You can hit up this link to either register (if you’re logged into Extra Crunch, the ticket is free) or purchase a ticket.

A full library of past episodes can be found here, and folks interested in checking out our future slate can find everything they need right here.

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Early Stage is the premier ‘how-to’ event for startup entrepreneurs and investors. You’ll hear first-hand how some of the most successful founders and VCs build their businesses, raise money and manage their portfolios. We’ll cover every aspect of company-building: Fundraising, recruiting, sales, product market fit, PR, marketing and brand building. Each session also has audience participation built-in – there’s ample time included for audience questions and discussion. Use code “TCARTICLE” to get 20 percent off at checkout right here.

In its latest strike against online content it doesn’t control Russia is throttling Twitter. State agency Roskomnadzor said today it was taking the action in response to the social media not removing banned content, claiming it had identified more than 3,000 unlawful posts that have not been taken down — and warning it could implement a total block on the service.

However the action by the comms regulator to slow down all Twitter’s mobile traffic and 50% of desktop users in Russia appeared to have briefly taken down Roskomnadzor’s own website earlier today.

Reports also circulated on social media that Russian government websites, including kremlin.ru, had been affected. At the time of writing these sites were accessible but earlier we were unable to access Roskomnadzor’s site.

The stand-off between the state agency and Twitter comes at a time when Russia is trying to clamp down on anti-corruption protestors who are supporters of the jailed opposition leader, Alexei Navalny — who has, in recent weeks, called for demonstrators to take to the streets to ramp up pressure on the regime.

Roskomnadzor’s statement makes no mention of the state’s push to censor political opposition — claiming only that the content it’s throttling Twitter for failing to delete is material relating to minors committing suicide; child pornography; and drug use. Hence it also claims to be taking the action to “protect Russian citizens”. However a draconian application of speech-chilling laws to try to silence political opposition are nothing new in Putin’s Russia.

The Russian regime has sought to get content it doesn’t like removed from foreign-based social media services a number of times in recent years, including — as now — resorting to technical means to limit access.

 

Most notoriously, back in 2018, an attempt by Russia to block access to the messaging service Telegram resulted in massive collateral damage to the local Internet as the block took down millions of (non-Telegram-related) IP addresses — disrupting those other services.

Also in 2018 Facebook-owned Instagram complied with a Russian request to remove content posted by Navalny — which earned it a shaming tweet from the now jailed politician.

Although now behind bars in Russia — Navalny was jailed in February, after Russia claimed he had violated the conditions of a suspended sentence — the prominent Putin critic has continued to use his official Twitter account as a megaphone to denounce corruption and draw attention to the injustice of his detention, following his attempted poisoning last year (which has been linked to Russia’s FSB).

Recent tweets from Navalny’s account include amplification of an investigation by the German newspaper Bild into RT DE, the Russian state-controlled media outlet Russia Today’s German channel — which the newspaper accuses of espionage in German targeting Navalny and his associates (he was staying in a German hospital in Berlin at the time, recovering from the attempted poisoning).

Slowing down access to Twitter is one way for Russia to try to put a lid on Navalny’s critical output on the platform — which also includes a recent retweet of a video claiming that Russian citizen’s taxes were used this winter by Putin and his cronies to fund yachts, whiskey and a Maldivian vacation.

Navalny’s account has also tweeted in recent hours to denounce his jailing by the Russian state following its attempt to poison him — saying: “This situation is called attempted murder”.

At the time of writing Twitter had not responded to requests for comment on Roskomnadzor’s action.

However last month, in a worrying development in India that’s also related to anti-government protests (in that case by farmers who are seeking to reverse moves to deregulate the market), Twitter caved in to pressure from the government — shuttering 500 accounts including some linked to the anti-government protests.

It also agreed to reduce the visibility of certain protest hashtags.

 

This morning Clara, a corporate spend-management startup focused on the Latin American market, announced its product launch and a $3.5 million pre-seed round led by General Catalyst.

The company’s funding caught TechCrunch’s eye as there has been a flurry of funding for related companies serving the United States market. From Divvy to Brex to Ramp to Airbase to Teampay, investors have poured capital into startups working to help companies better track and manage their spend.

Companies working in the fintech niche tend to monetize in one of two ways, namely interchange revenues and software incomes. Or more simply, some in the corporate spend category generate revenues when users swipe cards, earning a slice of the transaction. And some also charge for the software that they have wrapped around their cards and other methods of payment.

Clara is in the first camp, making its revenues today from interchange incomes, according to Gerry Giacomán Colyer and Diego Iván García Escobedo, the company’s co-founders. Colyer is the company’s CEO, while García Escobedo heads its product and tech work.

The pair told TechCrunch that the Mexican interchange market is more akin to the United States’ own (lucrative) than Europe’s own (less lucrative), meaning that if the company can sign up a host of customers for its free service — empieza hoy – sin costo, its website intones — it could post the same sort of revenue growth that has spurred some of its American comps to huge venture capital raises.

The startup’s potential has caught the eye of more than General Catalyst, a well-known venture capital firm. The two co-founders of Ramp are also investors in Clara. The startup’s round also included funds from a host of smaller firms and angels, including Canary Ventures, Adapt Ventures and Picus Capital, among others.

The co-founders want to bridge the gap in technology-enabled financial services that they found in Mexico. Colyer worked for G2 after a stint at Stanford, eventually moving back to Mexico and working on a micromobility startup called Uva Scooters. He discovered during the process that Mexican and other Latin American firms lacked some digital tools, like low- and zero-cost corporate spend software, to which American companies had ample access.

So, the pair of founders, who met at Grin Scooters, which had acquired Uva, set out to build Clara, tuning a model with proven success in America to work in Mexico. What sort of tweaking was needed? Local compliance to ensure high-levels of card acceptance, support for local tax law and receipt management, the pair said.

Thus far the company has only worked with around 100 customers, with the co-founders telling TechCrunch they have seen traction with high-growth companies, some of which are startups. That echoes what Brex tapped into when it was a more youthful upstart itself.

Today the company operates in Mexico only, but intends to support other markets over time.

Regarding the company’s $3.5 million raise, like many pre-seed and seed deals, the funds were acquired in a few tranches, including one in May of 2020. The rest of the capital came later in the year.

Seeing successful startup models that are familiar in the United States pop up in Latin America is a regular trend. Belvo, for example, is following in the tracks that Plaid laid down, bringing fintech APIs to the LatAm market. Given rising smartphone penetration, and rising card usage, perhaps Clara will find a good fit in its home market.

Looking ahead, TechCrunch is curious how quickly Clara can accrete new customer companies now that it has formally launched. If it can, and the interchange game proves successful, expect to hear from it again soon.