Author: azeeadmin

If you’re a startup that’s worried about building your team today for tomorrow’s successes you’re not going to want to miss our session with Bain Capital Ventures’ Sarah Smith at TechCrunch Early Stage on April 1 & 2.

The current Bain Capital Ventures partner who invests in early to mid-stage companies saw what it was like to grow a startup business firsthand as the vice president of human resources at Quora, a position she held from 2012 to 2016.

While at Quora, Sarah built the HR and operations teams responsible for company culture, compensation, benefits, equity refreshers, performance reviews, HRIS/ATS implementation, people development, policy enforcement and content moderation.

She scaled the company from 40 to 200 employees across all hiring from university to executive search.

After that, she became the vice president of advertising sales and operations, where she led the launch of monetization and onboarding of more than 500 advertisers to the self-service ads platform.

Smith joins an all-star cast of speakers at Early Stage. They range from Zoom CRO Ryan Azus (“How to build a sales team”) to Calendly founder Tope Awotona (“How to bootstrap”) to Kleiner Perkins’ Bucky Moore (“How to prep for Series A fundraising”), are making themselves available to answer your burning questions on just about any topic. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

Unlike other TechCrunch events, there is no “main stage” at our TC Early Stage events. Each session is designed to tackle one of the many core competencies any startup needs to be successful. But this isn’t just about listening — every session includes plenty of time built in for audience Q&A. Essentially, it’s all breakout sessions, all day.

What’s more — everyone who buys a ticket to TC Early Stage gets free access to Extra Crunch! Folks who buy a ticket to one of the two events get three months free, and folks who purchase a combination ticket (to both events) get six months free! An Extra Crunch membership includes:

• Weekly investor surveys
• Fundraising, growth, monetization and workforce advice from startup experts
• Market analysis
• Late-stage deep dives
• Access to weekly Extra Crunch Live events
• EC Perks Program (save big $$$ on services and products you already use)
• The TechCrunch List

Of course, TC Early Stage dual event ticket holders will get access to both events (April 1-2 and July 8-9) and have access to all the content that comes out of the event on demand. Plus you can take advantage of additional savings with Early Bird pricing for another couple of weeks!

Mercenary CEOs know all too well that this is about the most bang you can get for your buck. Period.

Check out the full list of speakers here and you can get your ticket now!

Apple has clarified that the iOS 14.5 beta is not actually allowing users to select a new default music service, as has been reported. Following the beta’s release back in February, a number of beta testers noticed that Siri would now ask what music service they would like to use when they asked Siri to play music. But Apple doesn’t consider this feature the equivalent to “setting a default” — an option it more recently began to allow for email and browser apps.

Instead, the feature is Siri intelligence-based, meaning it can improve and even change over time as Siri learns to better understand your listening habits.

For example, if you tell Siri to play a song, album or artist, it may ask you which service you want to use to listen to this sort of content. However, your response to Siri is not making that particular service your “default,” Apple says. In fact, Siri may ask you again at some point — a request that could confuse users if they thought their preferences had already been set.

Image Credits: iOS 14.5 screenshot

Apple also points out there’s no specific setting in iOS where users can configure a “default” music service, the way there is with email and browser apps. While many earlier reports did note this difference, they still referred to the feature as “setting a default,” which is technically incorrect. 

More broadly, the feature is an attempt to help Siri to learn the listening apps you want to use for different types of audio content — not just music. Perhaps you want to use Spotify to listen to music, but prefer to keep up with your podcasts in Apple Podcasts or some other third-party podcasts app. And you may want to listen to audiobooks in yet another app.

When Siri asks you the which service you want to use for these sorts of audio requests, it will present a list of the audio apps you have installed for you to choose from.

Image Credits: iOS 14.5 screenshot

In addition to Siri’s understanding of your habits — which are based on your responses and choices — app developers can optionally use APIs to provide Siri with access to more intelligence about what people listen to in their app and why. This could allow Siri to fulfill users’ requests with more accuracy. And all this processing takes place on the device.

The audio choice feature, of course, doesn’t prevent users from requesting a particular service by name, even if it’s not their usual preference.

For instance, you can still say something like “play smooth jazz radio on Pandora” to launch that app instead. However, if you continued to request Pandora by name for music requests — even though you had initially specified Apple Music or Spotify or some other service when Siri had first prompted you — then the next time you asked Siri to play music without specifically a service, the assistant may ask you again to choose a service.

Image Credits: iOS 14.5 screenshot

Although this may seem like a minor clarification, it has a greater importance given the increased regulatory scrutiny Apple is under these days over how its App Store and app ecosystem work. Spotify, in particular, has alleged that Apple is behaving in anti-competitive ways — for instance by requiring a commission on Spotify’s in-app purchases even though Apple runs a rival music service that Spotify claims has first-party advantages.

The audio choice feature had first appeared in iOS 14.5 beta 1, but had been pulled in beta 2. It has since returned with the release of beta 3, which again drew attention and headlines — as well as Apple’s response.

Although it’s not technically allowing you to set a “default,” the Siri-powered feature could eventually feel like one for users with consistent listening behavior. The iPhone will simply become smarter about how to play what you want to hear, without necessarily forcing you to use Apple’s own apps if you don’t want to.

Fintech startup ClearGlass Analytics has closed a £2.6 million ($3.6M) funding round for its platform, which aims to create greater transparency on fees in the long-term savings market, such as pensions and the wider asset management market. 

The £2.6m seed round includes European VC Lakestar and Outward VC, the venture arm of Investec, as well as several angels from both the asset management and pension fund worlds. These include Ruston Smith, a pension trustee; Richard Butcher, Chair of the PLSA (UK pension trade body); Chris Wilcox, former Global Head of JP Morgan Asset Management; and Rob O’Rahilly, Sikander Ilyas and Alex Large, also former JP Morgan employees.

ClearGlass is targeting the £1.5trillion mature ‘Defined Benefit’ pension schemes market and claims to now work with over 500 DB pension funds. It will use the funding to expand into the UK Defined Contribution pension market, and consolidate its early footprint in Europe and Africa.

How ClearGlass works is that it acts as a data interface between asset managers and their clients. Pension funds then use the platform to see all of their investment costs in one place, thus getting more data than usual from more asset managers and other suppliers. This helps the funds see the ‘true cost’ of what they are paying for the management of their investments. ClearGlass claims to be able to uncover the kinds of costs of asset management that, in some instances, can be more than double those expected.

The startup recently did an analysis of the cost and performance of over 400 asset managers. It found that while most UK asset managers were meeting minimum standards for data delivery, quality, and accuracy, 30 (including some powerful players) did not pass their tests.

The company was founded by Dr. Christopher Sier, a World Bank and FCA expert who previously developed the cost transparency standard at the request of the FCA, and co-founders Ritesh Singhania and Kunal Varma.

Sier, founder and CEO, said: “Finding your costs are so much larger is shocking, but also something to be celebrated. These incremental costs were always there, they just weren’t exposed, and now you can identify those and bring about change. You can’t manage what you don’t measure.”

In an interview with TechCrunch, Ritesh Singhaniam, COO, said getting the data about pension funds is normally “super challenging and complicated. And second of all, even when you got the data, you couldn’t make head nor tail of it because you can’t compare it across funds. What we have done is that we have been the line of communication between the manager and the pension fund. So we have built a piece of technology that helps with the communication between the asset managers, and the pension funds to be able to collect that data, check that data. And finally, give them something that doesn’t require them to spend 20 hours to understand it.”

ClearGlass was incubated by the Founders Factory accelerator.

Colombian startup Elenas says it’s helping tens of thousands of women make money by selling products online. And today, it announced that it has raised $6 million in Series A funding.

That’s on top of the $2 million seed round that Elenas announced last fall. Founder and CEO Zach Oschin said that demand continues to grow, particularly with high unemployment levels (particularly among women), while consumers remain nervous about in-person shopping during the pandemic.

“We’ve been able to provide opportunities for tens of thousands of women to earn extra income,” Oschin said.

He suggested that Elenas is essentially a reinvention of the direct sales/catalog sales model that 11 million women participate in across the Latin America. The idea is that independent seller/entrepreneurs (often but not always women) can browse a catalog of products in categories like beauty, personal care and electronics, from more than 250 distributors and brands, all available at a discounted wholesale price. They decide what they want to sell, how much they want to mark the price up and then promote the products on social channels like WhatsApp and Facebook.

Besides its digital focus, Oschin said said Elenas is better for the resellers because there’s less risk: “We don’t hold inventory for the company, which is very different than traditional direct sales, and our entrepreneurs don’t ever hold inventory.” Nor do those entrepreneurs need to get involved in things ose like payment collection or delivery, because Elenas and its distributor partners handle all of that.

“For us, the goal is to provide this backend operating system that gives women everything they need to run their store,” he added.

Elenas offers an automated on-boarding process for the sellers, but Oschin said that within the app, “we do a lot of work to train our sellers how to sell.”

Elenas CEO Zach Oschin

The company (which participated in our Latin American Startup Battlefield in 2018) says it’s now paid out more than $7 million to its sellers. It doesn’t limit participation by gender, but Oschin estimated that more than 95% of sellers are women, with 80% of them under the age of 30 and about a third of them without any previous direct sales experience.

The new funding comes from Leo Capital, FJ Labs, Alpha4 Ventures and Meesho. Oschin said the company’s investors have a presence across six different continents, reflecting its international vision. Indeed, one of its next steps is expanding across Latin America, starting with Mexico and then Peru.

“Having seen the meteoric growth of social commerce in India and China we are excited to partner with Elenas as they have demonstrated the right product and operating model for the region.”  said Leo Capital co-founder Shwetank Verma in a statement. “The Elenas team has built a solution that’s inclusive, impactful and is well positioned for exponential growth.”

Porsche is taking its electrification ambitions to two wheels.

The German automaker unveiled two electric bikes Thursday, alongside the global debut of the Porsche Taycan Cross Turismo, the latest variant to its EV flagship.

Both electric bikes are said to be inspired by the Taycan, Porsche’s first electric vehicle that kicked off its broader EV ambitions. While the underlying inspiration and foundation are the same— both have have full-suspension carbon frames — each bike has a slightly different purpose and customer.

The bikes are a collective effort. They were developed in collaboration with eBike expert Rotwild and use components from well-known bike parts manufacturers Shimano, Magura and Crankbrothers. High-design touches from Porsche — the spit and polish — and customers get a luxe ebike priced between $8,500 and $10,700.

The Porsche eBikes, both of which are manufactured in Dieburg, Germany, will be available this spring in three frame sizes at Porsche dealers and select specialist bicycle outlets.

The Porsche eBike Sport is priced at $10,700, while the ‘cheaper’ Porsche eBike Cross costs $8,549.

Image Credits: Porsche

The Porsche eBike Sport is designed as a daily rider. The bike is equipped with a new Shimano EP8 motor, which provides motor support up to 25 km/h (about 15 mph), an Shimano electronic gear shifting system and Magura high-performance brakes that are integrated into the handlebars. The Sport bike also has M99 LED lights from Supernova, which are embedded in the handlebar stem and aerodynamic seat post.

In addition, high-quality suspension components such as the Magura upside-down suspension fork and the Fox rear shock absorber, in combination with smooth-running tires, provide a sporty and balanced ride on asphalt or gentle terrain.

Meanwhile, the Porsche eBike Cross is aimed at riders who might be seeking rougher roads. The Cross has a new motor developed by Shimano, Magura-MT Trail high-performance brakes with extra-large, heat-resistant brake discs for deceleration and a mechanical Shimano XT 12-fold shifting system for quick gear changes. The seat post is hydraulically adjustable from Crankbrothers. The handlebars also have a Shimano color display, which shows not only speed but also distance and range in real time.

On the 25th of January, Techstars Seattle announced its 12th class featuring 10 startups from different parts of the world. The accelerator, which has accepted only a handful of African startups, included one from Zimbabwe in this class.

AfriBlocks is a global pan-African marketplace of vetted African freelance professionals. The startup was founded by Tongayi Choto and Roger Roman in July 2020 and has offices in Harare and Los Angeles,.

The company is trying to address the high unemployment rate that plagues many African countries by making it easier for people to find work. Quite a number of international and local freelance websites exist to meet these needs. Still, according to CEO, Choto, most of them offer too many options with no adequate vetting process.

“It can be very hard to find African freelancers. If a customer is lucky enough to get past those hurdles and find a freelancer to work with, they often don’t have the proper collaboration tools to complete the project in a precise and timely manner,” he told TechCrunch.

In a global freelance market worth more than $800 billion, AfriBlocks says it is doing this different by equipping African freelancers with intuitive collaboration tools and a secure payment system that makes it easy to get remote contract projects completed. 

When a job is posted on its platform, the company claims that they save the customer the trouble of perusing thousands of freelancers profiles and portfolios. Instead, they use automation tools to match three freelancers who fit the user’s qualifications.

Also, AfriBlocks assigns a project manager to the selected freelancer who manages the project through completion. Once the job is complete, AfriBlocks collect a transaction fee, and the payment is released from escrow. This ensures that expectations are clear and deadlines are met for freelancers and customers. 

In addition, Choto says the company offers community and development resources that help them upskill and remain competitive in the global marketplace. This has been done in partnership with edtech company Coursera and African non-profit Ingressive for Good. It is also in talks with online learning platform, Datacamp, to do the same for data scientists.

Roger Roman (co-founder)

As peculiar to most African startups, funding has been hard to come by for the team. Bootstrapping seemed like the only course of action to take, and it seems to have taken them far. In less than a year, the company has onboarded over 2,000 freelancers and more than 400 buyers. It has also completed up to 250 jobs generating over $60,000 in revenue. This progress has attracted the likes of Techstars and Google to provide them with funding and network.

“We’ve encountered the problems that many Black founders face, such as scarce fundraising sources. However, organizations like Techstars Seattle, Transparent Collective, and Google for Startups have helped us by providing mentorship, networking opportunities, and investor demo days showcases,” Roman said.

AfriBlocks joins African startups like Farmcrowdy, OnePipe, Risevest, Eversend, OjaExpress, who have participated in different Techstars accelerators worldwide.

Before AfriBlocks, Choto, who grew up in Zimbabwe, served as a product manager at BillMari, a pan-African remittance service leveraging bitcoin technology. For Roger, whose upbringing was on the westside of Chicago, he doubles as an active angel investor and a VC scout.

It is predicted that freelancers will account for as much as 80% of the entire workforce worldwide by 2030. Freelance work has become a viable source of employment and has shifted from being a vocation people engage in to supplement their income to being a full-time source of jobs for Africans.

The long term goal for AfriBlocks is to build the tech infrastructure for the future of work in Africa. According to the company, participating in Techstars is the right path to that destination.

“In anticipation of the impending global human talent shortage that could result in 85 million jobs being unfilled and the loss of $85 trillion annually, our long-term goal is to make Africa the global hub for technical and creative freelancers by providing the rails for companies to work in Africa and with remote African talent,” Choto said. 

Cryptocurrency exchange company Bitfinex is launching Bitfinex Pay, a cryptocurrency payment gateway. With this new product, online merchants can accept payments in various cryptocurrencies. It should make cross-border transactions easier in particular.

While there are a few crypto payment gateways already, Bitfinex Pay has the advantage of working seamlessly with the company’s exchange. Merchants can create a widget and start accepting payments in Ethereum and bitcoin. Payments are deposited on your exchange wallet.

Bitfinex’s widget works a bit like the “Buy Now with PayPal” button. When you click on the Bitfinex Pay button, you’re redirected to the cryptocurrency company’s website. Once your payment is approved, you’re redirected back to the original merchant website. Payments are capped at the equivalent of $1,000 in cryptocurrencies.

You don’t pay any fee with Bitfinex Pay transactions. Of course, there are some network fees involved with sending crypto tokens. Merchants will also end up paying fees if they want to convert their cryptocurrency holdings on the exchange and transfer fiat money out of their account.

Bitfinex Pay also lets you accept Tether payments. Tether is a stablecoin, which means that one unit of Tether is supposed to be worth one USD — it doesn’t fluctuate over time.

That statement has been challenged as the attorney general in New York has concluded that Tethers weren’t fully backed by USD sitting in bank accounts at all times. At some point, Bitfinex couldn’t access $850 million held in a Panamanian bank.

As a result, Tether and Bitfinex are currently banned in the state of New York. So you’ll have to determine whether you trust Bitfinex enough to use it as part of your checkout process on your website.

General Motors is exploring building a second U.S. battery cell manufacturing plant with its joint-venture partner Seoul, South Korea-based LG Chem.

If the plant moves forward, it would be the latest in a series of investments aimed at building out the auto giant’s portfolio of electric vehicles. The company’s joint venture with LG, Ultium Cells LLC, is already at work constructing a $2.3 billion battery cell manufacturing facility in Lordstown, Ohio.

The companies hope to have a decision on the factory in the first half of 2021, GM spokesman Dan Flores told TechCrunch. He declined to specify possible locations for the site but Tennessee is high on the list, according to reporting from the Wall Street Journal.

GM has set ambitious targets for decarbonizing its operations and pledged steep investments to get there. Through 2025 alone the company said it would bring thirty EV models across its brands to the global market and spend $27 billion on electrification and automated technology—a 35% increase from 2020 spending. By the mid-2030s, GM said its fleet will be all-EV.

“Clearly, with our commitment to an all-electric future, we will need a lot of battery cells,” Flores said.

He declined to comment on the ongoing shortage of battery cells, which has affected EV manufacturers Tesla and Nikola. President Joe Biden issued an executive order at the end of February instructing federal agencies to identify risks in the supply chains for batteries, semiconductors, and other critical items, including where supply chains are dependent on “competitor nations.”

GM CEO Mary Barra said in a virtual investor presentation last week that the battery shortage is one reason the company is investing in its own battery cell manufacturing. She alluded to plans to grow the company’s battery cell manufacturing operations but did not go into specifics.

“There’s more coming than we’ve announced already,” she said.

Global air transport data giant SITS has confirmed a data breach involving passenger data.

The company said in a brief statement on Thursday that it had been the “victim of a cyberattack,” and that certain passenger data stored on its U.S. servers had been breached. The cyberattack was confirmed on February 24, after which the company contacted affected airlines.

SITA is one of the largest aviation IT companies in the world, said to be serving around 90% of the world’s airlines, which rely on the company’s passenger service system Horizon to manage reservations, ticketing, and aircraft departures.

But it remains unclear exactly what data was accessed or stolen.

When reached, SITA spokesperson Edna Ayme-Yahil declined to say what specific data had been taken, citing an ongoing investigation. The company said that the incident “affects various airlines around the world, not just in the United States.”

SITA confirmed it had notified several airlines — Malaysia Airlines; Finnair; Singapore Airlines; and Jeju Air, an airline in South Korea — which have already made statements about the breach, but declined to name other affected airlines.

In an email to affected customers seen by TechCrunch, Singapore Airlines said it was not a customer of SITA’s Horizon passenger service system but that about half a million frequent flyer members had their membership number and tier status compromised. The airline said that the transfer of this kind of data is “necessary to enable verification of the membership tier status, and to accord to member airlines’ customers the relevant benefits while traveling.”

The airline said passenger itineraries, reservations, ticketing, and passport data were not affected.

SITA is one of a handful of companies in the aviation market providing passenger ticketing and reservation systems to airlines, alongside Sabre and Amadeus.

Sabre reported a major data breach in mid-2017 affecting its hotel reservation system, after hackers scraped over a million customer credit cards. The U.S.-based company agreed in December to a $2.4 million settlement and to make changes to its cybersecurity policies following the breach.

In 2019, a security researcher found a vulnerability in Amadeus’ passenger booking system, used by Air France, British Airways, and Qantas among others, which made it easy to alter or access traveler records.

Aero, a startup backed by Garrett Camp’s startup studio Expa, has raised $20 million in Series A funding — right as CEO Uma Subramanian said demand for air travel is returning “with a vengeance.”

I last wrote about Aero in 2019, when it announced Subramanian’s appointment as CEO, along with the fact that it had raised a total of $16 million in funding. Subramanian told me that after the announcement, the startup (which had already run test flights between Mykonos and Ibiza) spent the next few months buying and retrofitting planes, with plans for a summer 2020 launch.

Obviously, the pandemic threw a wrench into those plans, but a smaller wrench than you might think. Subramanian said that as borders re-opened and travel resumed in a limited capacity, Aero began to offer flights.

“We had a great summer,” she said. “We sold a lot of seats, and we were gross margin positive in July and August.”

The startup describes its offering as “semi-private” air travel — you fly out of private terminals, on small and spacious planes (Subramanian said the company has taken vehicles with 37 seats and retrofitted them to hold only 16), with a personalized, first-class experience delivered by its concierge team. Aero currently offers a single route between Los Angeles and Aspen, with one-way tickets costing $1,250.

Subramanian was previously CEO of Airbus’ helicopter service Voom, and she said she approached the company “very skeptically,” since the conventional wisdom in the aviation industry is that the business is all about “putting as many people into a finite amount of square footage” as possible. But she claimed that early demand showed her that “the thesis is real.”

“There is a set of people who want this,” she said. “Air travel used to be aspirational, something people got dressed up for. We want to bring back the magical part of the travel experience.”

After all, if you’re the kind of “premium traveler” who might already spend “thousands of dollars a night” on a vacation in Amangiri, Utah, it seems a little silly to be “spending hours trying to find the a low-cost flight out of Salt Lake City.”

Image Credits: Aero

Subramanian suggested that while demand for business travel may be slow to return (it sounds like she enjoyed the ability to fundraise without getting on a plane), the demand for leisure travel is already here, and will only grow as the pandemic ends. Plus, the steps that Aero took to create a luxury experience also means that it’s also well-suited for social distancing.

Speaking of fundraising, the Series A was led by Keyframe Capital, with Keyframe’s chief investment officer John Rapaport joining the Aero board. Cyrus Capital Partners and Expa also participated.

The new funding will allow Aero to grow its team and to add more flights, Subramanian said. Next up is a route between Los Angeles and Cabo San Lucas scheduled to launch in April, and she added that the company will be returning to Europe this year.

“It’s a horrendous time to be Lufthansa, but counterintuitively, it’s best time to start something from scratch,” she said — in large part because it’s been incredibly affordable to buy planes and other assets.