Author: azeeadmin

Apple is facing another antitrust investigation in Europe into how it operates the iOS App Store.

The UK’s Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) announced today that it’s opened an investigation following a number of complaints from developers alleging unfair terms and as a result of its own work in the digital sector.

“The CMA’s investigation will consider whether Apple has a dominant position in connection with the distribution of apps on Apple devices in the UK — and, if so, whether Apple imposes unfair or anti-competitive terms on developers using the App Store, ultimately resulting in users having less choice or paying higher prices for apps and add-ons,” it wrote in a press release.

“This is only the beginning of the investigation and no decision has yet been made on whether Apple is breaking the law,” it added.

In a statement, Andrea Coscelli, chief executive of the CMA, also said: “Millions of us use apps every day to check the weather, play a game or order a takeaway. So, complaints that Apple is using its market position to set terms which are unfair or may restrict competition and choice — potentially causing customers to lose out when buying and using apps – warrant careful scrutiny.”

An Apple spokesperson sent us this statement in response to the CMA action:

We created the App Store to be a safe and trusted place for customers to download the apps they love and a great business opportunity for developers everywhere. In the UK alone, the iOS app economy supports hundreds of thousands of jobs, and any developer with a great idea is able to reach Apple customers around the world.

We believe in thriving and competitive markets where any great idea can flourish. The App Store has been an engine of success for app developers, in part because of the rigorous standards we have in place — applied fairly and equally to all developers — to protect customers from malware and to prevent rampant data collection without their consent. We look forward to working with the UK Competition and Markets Authority to explain how our guidelines for privacy, security and content have made the App Store a trusted marketplace for both consumers and developers.

The European Union already has an open antitrust investigation into a number of elements of Apple’s business — after announcing a probe of the App Store and the iPhone maker’s payment offering, Apple Pay, last summer.

US lawmakers have also been questioning Apple as part of a major antitrust probe into big tech. And a bill has just advanced in Arizona that aims to force both Apple and Google to allow third party payment options in their smartphone stores.

The EU’s Apple investigation, meanwhile, remains ongoing. The video games publisher Epic Games — which has been engaged in a vicious public battle with Apple over what it decries as Cupertino’s unfair ‘tax’ on developers — recently sought to join the EU’s case by filing a complaint with the European Commission last month.

Epic also previously filed the same complaint in the UK — so it’s one of the unhappy developers the CMA cites.

With the UK now outside the European Union (post-Brexit), the CMA looks set to take on a more prominent role as a regional regulator. It’s free to investigate the same issues as the Commission (whereas under EU rules national regulators are supposed to avoid duplicating effort). So if it can move faster than the bloc’s competition commission it may have the opportunity to mould the standards that apply to tech giants. (Although the CMA said today that it “continues to coordinate closely” with the Commission and other agencies to tackle what it described as “global concerns”.)

Last fall the UK also announced a plan to establish a pro-competition regulation regime aimed at tackling the market power of big tech.

That followed a major market study of online platforms and digital advertising carried out by the CMA and the regulator published its advice to the government on shaping that regime in December. “As the CMA works with the government on these proposals – which will complement its current enforcement powers – the CMA will continue to use its existing powers to their fullest extent in order to protect competition in these areas,” it said today.

“Our ongoing examination into digital markets has already uncovered some worrying trends,” Coscelli added. “We know that businesses, as well as consumers, may suffer real harm if anti-competitive practices by big tech go unchecked. That’s why we’re pressing on with setting up the new Digital Markets Unit and launching new investigations wherever we have grounds to do so.”

In other recent actions scrutinizing tech giants the CMA has opened an investigation into Google’s plan to phase out third party tracking cookies and launched an inquiry into Uber’s planned acquisition of UK SaaS maker Autocab.

China’s relaxation of its one-child restriction has not delivered the population targets set by its policy planners. In 2019, the birth rate in China slumped to a seven-decade low, which experts attribute to changes in social attitudes, skyrocketing living costs as well as a demanding work culture.

One way to fix China’s demographic crisis is to lighten mothers’ burden, said Ding Lei, founder and CEO of NetEase, the second-biggest gaming company in China which also runs a popular music streaming service.

Ding made the proposal at China’s annual parliament session this week, comprising the meetings of the National People’s Congress (NPC) and the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference (CPPCC). Each spring, delegates from a wide range of backgrounds, including political elites and tech billionaires, gather in Beijing for the legislative meetings informally known as the “two sessions.”

Ding is a member of the CPPCC, which includes other tech bosses like Tencent’s Pony Ma, Xiaomi’s Lei Jun and Baidu’s Robin Li. Ding suggested efforts should be directed to address costly childbearing, short maternity leave, an undersupply of children’s healthcare, an underdeveloped childcare system and other “practical pain points” to take burdens off women’s shoulders.

Ding further advocated for shared parental leave “at one’s discretion” to “give men more responsibilities in parenting.” The country, he argued, should bear women’s reproductive costs and the number of nursery facilities should be increased.

Most provinces in China have introduced paternity leave in recent years, but the length and implementation efforts vary across regions. In Guangdong, home to NetEase and Tencent, fathers are entitled to up to 15 days of paid paternity leave. Shanghai, on the other hand, falls on the lower end of the spectrum with 10 days.

But some experts argue the one-week average for fathers is far from enough to liberate new mothers, who receive a minimum of 98 days of paid maternity leave but could get more depending on where they reside. NetEase’s family leave policy is in line with national and regional regulations, a company representative told TechCrunch.

Occasionally, China’s tech giants disclose or give hints about their gender ratio. In 2019, 35% of NetEase’s 20,000 employees were women, the company says, and about 25% of its top management were female in the year. Online travel agent Ctrip, which prides itself on benefits for female employees, said in 2018 that over 60% of its staff were female. Jack Ma, a frequent speaker at female leadership forums, pledged in 2019 that females must make up more than 33% of Alibaba staff.

Food delivery start-up Deliveroo has today confirmed its £8bn ($11bn) stock market floatation in London, something which was on the cards previously.

The eight-year-old company will use the “dual-class” innovation which has been introduced to the London Stock Exchange by the UK government in a bid to keep UK companies from being lured over to the NASDAQ, as well as attract continental European listings.

The listing will be on the London Stock Exchange’s “premium” segment. Dual-class shares are popular in the US – where it is used by companies such as Facebook and Alphabet – because it allows founders to take a longer view of strategy and retain more control of their companies during decisions such as mergers and acquisitions.

Will Shu, CEO of Deliveroo, said in a statement: “Deliveroo was born in London. This is where I founded the company and delivered our first order. London is a great place to live, work, do business and eat. That’s why I’m so proud and excited about a potential listing here.”

Deliveroo’s business has boomed during pandemic-related lockdowns – it posted six-months of consecutive profits throughout this period – and now plans to expand.

Although Deliveroo’s listing came comes just a day after the British government gave the green light to recommendations for the dual-class shares, Deliveroo’s listing was always expected to be in London, given it’s UK base, so this news looks to have a political tinge attached to it. Indeed, the press release was handily issued with a supportive statement from the Chancellor of the Exchequer.

Claudia Arney, Chair of Deliveroo, said: “The time-limited dual-class structure would provide Will and his team with the certainty needed to execute against their ambitious growth plan to become the definitive online food company.”

Deliveroo’s plans include expanding its ‘ghost’ kitchens; on-demand grocery; extending its Plus subscription service; and offering its Signature service to restaurants, which allows customers to order delivery via a restaurants’ own website.

The multibillion-pound IPO will be a shot in the arm for The City after Amsterdam overtook London as Europe’s largest share trading center in January, post-Brexit.

Deliveroo pegged a $7 billion valuation in January after raising $180 million from investors.

Bolt, an Uber competitor that is building an international on-demand network of services to transport people, food and other items in cars, scooters and bikes across Europe and Africa, has picked up some strategic funding today to continue expanding its business in emerging markets.

The International Finance Corporation, a division of the World Bank, is investing €20 million ($24 million) in the Tallinn, Estonia-based startup to open up more services across Eastern Europe and Africa, with a specific mention of more services in Ukraine and Nigeria, two of those regions’ biggest economies, and more innovative services to target demographic groups that might be under-represented or under-served, such as women. 

Funding from the IFC is a significant endorsement of a company, if at the same time a relatively small amount compared to Bolt’s wider fundraising efforts.

Most recently, it raised $182 million in December at a significant hike to its previous valuation (which had been $1.9 billion). A Bolt spokesperson tells us that, once again, “our valuation has grown with the latest funding round, but we’re not disclosing the updated number.” (For the record, in December we calculated that the valuaton was probably around $4.3 billion, based on a 1.5x multiple on GMV of €3.5 billion, figures provided to us by CEO and co-founder Markus Villig. That figure wasn’t disputed, nor confirmed, though.)

People may not consider the IFC in the same breath as more typical VCs like SoftBank, Sequoia, Index Ventures, or Andreessen Horowitz, but it’s a significant player when it comes to backing startups around the world. Last year alone it invested $22 billion in companies, it said.

Backing a transportation startup is a notable move for it, considering that a lot of the IFC’s interest in tech has typically been around financial services. For example, it has also invested money into CurrencyCloud, Remitly, CompareAsiaGroup, and Kreditech, among others.

But improving transportation is another development target — in particular when you consider that companies like Bolt are built like marketplaces that provide income to people, infrastructure to businesses (in the form of delivery), on top of its most obvious service helping consumers get around.

“We are looking forward to partnering with IFC to further support entrepreneurship, empower women and increase access to affordable mobility services in Africa and Eastern Europe,” said Villig, in a statement. “Together with the investment from the European Investment Bank last year, we are proud to have sizable and strategically important institutions backing us and recognizing the strategic value Bolt is providing to emerging economies”.

Bolt’s efforts in emerging markets have long been one the key ways that the company differentiates itself from Uber — perhaps logical, considering that the company itself was founded in an emerging economy. Since launching in 2013, it has picked up over 50 million customers and more than 1.5 million drivers in 40 countries, including 400,000 drivers in 70 cities on the African continent.

That strategy has also grown over time to include services for under-represented groups in these under-represented markets. Bolt is piloting a “Women Only” ride-hailing service in South Africa, with female drivers and passengers to improve job opportunities and general safety, one of the programs that the IFC funding will support, it said.

“Technology can and should unlock new pathways for sustainable development and women’s empowerment,” said Stephanie von Friedeburg, IFC Senior Vice President of Operations, in a statement. “Our investment in Bolt aims to help tap into technology to disrupt the transport sector in a way that is good for the environment, creates more flexible work opportunities for women, and provides safer and more affordable transportation access in emerging markets.”

Countingup, the U.K. fintech offering a business current account with built-in accounting features, has closed £9.1 million in Series A investment. Leading the round is Framework Venture Partners, with participation from Gresham House Ventures, Sage and existing investors.

It’s noteworthy that Countingup has previously taken investment from ING, and the addition of Sage as a backer is interesting since both could help the startup reach more business customers. It also potentially sets up one future road to exit. However, let’s not get ahead of ourselves.

Founded in 2017 by Tim Fouracre, who previously founded cloud accounting software Clear Books, Countingup now boasts over 34,000 business customers. The company’s long-term vision is to be the one “financial hub” for micro businesses in the U.K. and beyond. Its initial “attack vector” was to combine a business bank account with bookkeeping features to help automate the filing of accounts — a major time sink and pain-point for sole traders and small businesses.

Today that includes a business bank account with its own sort code and account number, a Mastercard for making payments and support for faster payments and direct debits. On the accounting software side, Countingup currently supports automated bookkeeping, invoicing, receipts, payment of bills, tax estimates and profit and loss reporting.

In addition, accountants can be given limited access via the web to better support clients banking with Countingup. This includes the option for business owners to share real-time bookkeeping data with their accountant, “eliminating the pains of re-authorisation requests, data lags, duplicates, and inaccuracies,” says the fintech.

To that end, Fouracre tells me the new funding will be used to quickly scale up the team from 30 to 80 people. “This will accelerate our roadmap enabling more swim lanes of product work to be on the go concurrently,” he says.

That roadmap includes tax filing, new financial services (e.g. loans, card payment services) and multi-currency invoicing and payments to support the 33% of SMEs in the U.K. that trade internationally. A web version of the app for small business customers is planned too.

“We will also be building out our sales and marketing teams for more aggressive growth,” adds Fouracre.

Countingup’s business model combines both SaaS and fintech. On the SaaS side, the company earns monthly subscription fees. On the fintech side, it generates revenue from banking activity (e.g. interchange fees) on Mastercard spend. In the future, that will likely include other sources of income via offering credit, payments and FX.

Comments Neal Watkins, EVP, Small Business Segment at Sage: “Investing in high-growth SaaS businesses is core to our strategy to enable small businesses and accountants to survive and thrive. This is an exciting opportunity to be part of the startup journey in a new way as businesses explore the benefits of bringing accounting and financial services together”.

WhatsApp is rolling out support for voice and video calling to its desktop app, the Facebook-owned messaging service said Thursday, providing relief to countless people sitting in front of computers who have had to reach for their phone every time their WhatsApp rang.

For now, WhatsApp said its nearly five-year-old desktop app for Mac and Windows will only support one-to-one calls for now, but that it will be expanding this feature to include group voice and video calls “in the future.”

Video calls work “seamlessly” for both portrait and landscape orientation, and the desktop client is “set to be always on top so you never lose your video chats in a browser tab or stack of open windows,” it said.

Speaking of which, support for voice and video calls is not being extended to WhatsApp Web, the browser version of the service, at the moment, a spokesperson told TechCrunch. (Facebook launched dedicated desktop app for its Messenger service last year, which supports group video calls.)

The new feature support should come in handy to millions of people who use WhatsApp’s desktop client everyday and have had to use Zoom or Google Meet for one-to-one video calls on desktop partly because of convenience.

WhatsApp, used by over 2 billion people, hasn’t shared how popular video and voice calls are on its platform, but said it processed over 1.4 billion calls on New Year’s Eve — the day usage tends to peak on the Facebook-owned platform.

Like the 100 billion messages WhatsApp processes on its platform each day, voice and video calls are also end-to-end encrypted, it said.

Once known for taking quarters to push a feature improvement to its app, WhatsApp has visibly grown more aggressive with adding new features in the past year. In late January, Facebook added opt-in biometric fingerprint, face, or iris scan authentication for WhatsApp on desktop and the web, an additional protection layer that makes more sense after today’s update.

It rolled out ephemeral messages, photos, and videos that disappear after seven days late last year, and also rolled out its payments service in India, its biggest market by users.

The new feature additions come as WhatsApp is attempting to convince users to agree to its planned changes to privacy policy — which has received some heat on Tech Twitter. Whether those concerns raised by a handful of people on Twitter extends to the larger population remains to be seen.

Payfazz and Xfers, two startups that want to increase financial inclusion in Southeast Asia, announced today they have joined forces to create a new holding entity called Fazz Financial Group. As part of the deal, Payfazz, an agent-based financial services network in Indonesia, invested $30 million into payments infrastructure provider Xfers.

Based in Singapore, Xfers will serve as the B2B and Southeast Asia arm of Fazz Financial Group, while Payfazz, which already uses Xfers’ payments infrastructure, will continue expanding in Indonesia. The two companies will retain their names while working together under the new holding entity.

Both Payfazz and Xfers are Y Combinator alums, and want to make financial services accessible to more Southeast Asians, even if they don’t have a bank account. Xfers co-founder Tianwei Liu told TechCrunch in an email he and Payfazz co-founder Hendra Kwik began talking about joining forces in early 2020 because of their startups’ shared goals.

“This is also coupled with the fact that last year, the COVID-19 pandemic has driven a significant increase in demand for digital payments and financial services across Indonesian rural areas, creating a huge growth opportunity for us,” Liu added.

Kwik will serve as Fazz Financial Group’s group CEO, while Liu will be the financial entity’s deputy CEO. Both will continue serving as CEOs of their respective companies. Fazz Financial Group also appointed as its chief financial officer Robert Polana, who previously held the same role at booking platform Tiket.com.

In Indonesia, Payfazz has built a network of 250,000 financial agents to reach people in rural areas where many banks don’t operate branches. Customers deposit cash with agents, and that balance can used to pay phone, electricity and other bills.

Payfazz, which announced a $53 million Series B in July from investors including Tiger Global and Y Combinator, also offers loans and payment services for offline retailers. As part of Fazz Financial Group, it will continue to build its agent banking network.

Payfazz uses payment infrastructure developed by Xfers to accept digital payments. Originally launched six years ago with an API for bank transfers, Xfers has since expanded its portfolio of software to include payment acceptance for businesses, tools for disbursing and transferring funds and a cryptocurrency wallet. In 2020, Xfers obtained a Major Payment Institution license for e-money issuance from the Monetary Authority of Singapore.

Xfers will continue to serve clients in Indonesia and Singapore with its payments infrastructure, which enables them to accept bank transfers, e-wallet funds and payments through convenience stores and agent banking networks (like Payfazz). Xfers says it has access to more than 10 million underbanked consumers in Indonesia through its work with agent banking services, and also plans to expand into Thailand, the Philippines, Malaysia and Vietnam.

Fazz Financial Group plans to launch two new products later this year: a zero-integration payment solution for Singapore-based merchants and a single-integration solution that will connect local payment methods across Southeast Asia.

Liu said that, unlike the United States, Southeast Asia “has a fragmented local payments landscape, even within each country,” meaning that consumers often use several payment methods. Creating a single-integration for payment methods in Southeast Asia gives brands a growth channel when entering new countries, allowing them to scale up more quickly, he added.

“The COVID-19 pandemic lockdown has also driven a big surge in online sales and transactions across Southeast Asia, so there is a huge need for online payments by businesses and merchants across the region,” Liu said. “The zero-integration and single-integration solution will help businesses and merchants start accepting online payments quickly and easily with a simple integration within minutes, without any need to deal with complex regulation/license handling and technology development.”

A security flaw in a website run by the government of West Bengal in India exposed the lab results of at least hundreds of thousands of residents, though likely millions, who took a COVID-19 test.

The website is part of the West Bengal government’s mass coronavirus testing program. Once a COVID-19 test result is ready, the government sends a text message to the patient with a link to its website containing their test results.

But security researcher Sourajeet Majumder found that the link containing the patient’s unique test identification number was scrambled with base64 encoding, which can be easily converted using online tools. Because the identification numbers were incrementally sequenced, the website bug meant that anyone could change that number in their browser’s address bar and view other patients’ test results.

The test results contain the patient’s name, sex, age, postal address, and if the patient’s lab test result came back positive, negative, or inconclusive for COVID-19.

Majumder told TechCrunch that he was concerned a malicious attacker could scrape the site and sell the data. “This is a privacy violation if somebody else gets access to my private information,” he said.

Two redacted COVID-19 lab test results exposed as a result of a security vulnerability on the West Bengal government’s website. (Screenshot: TechCrunch)

Majumder reported the vulnerability to India’s CERT, the country’s dedicated cybersecurity response unit, which acknowledged the issue in an email. He also contacted the West Bengal government’s website manager, who did not respond. TechCrunch independently confirmed the vulnerability and also reached out to the West Bengal government, which pulled the website offline, but did not return our requests for comment.

TechCrunch held our report until the vulnerability was fixed or no longer presented a risk. At the time of publication, the affected website remains offline.

It’s not known exactly how many COVID-19 lab results were exposed because of this security lapse, or if anyone other than Majumder discovered the vulnerability. At the time the website was pulled offline at the end of February, the state government had tested more than 8.5 million residents for COVID-19.

West Bengal is one of the most populated states of India, with about 90 million residents. Since the start of the pandemic, the state government has recorded more than 10,000 coronavirus deaths.

It’s the latest of several security incidents in the past few months to hit India and its response to the coronavirus pandemic.

Last May, India’s largest cell network Jio admitted a security lapse after a security researcher found a database containing the company’s coronavirus symptom checker, which Jio had launched months earlier.

In October, a security researcher found Dr Lal PathLabs left hundreds of spreadsheets containing millions of patient booking records — including for COVID-19 tests — on a public storage server that was not protected with a password, allowing anyone to access sensitive patient data.

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Bond, the growth-stage firm that spun out of the Kleiner Perkins Digital Growth Fund in late 2018, is closing a second fund with $2 billion, suggests a new SEC filing that says the amount has not yet been raised, though investment firms sometimes file their paperwork at the final stages of their fundraising and even long afterward.

Axios was first to flag the paperwork.

Earlier today, we reached out to the firm — which closed its debut fund with $1.25 billion in 2019 — and are awaiting more information. But that Bond would be raising almost twice as much capital for its second vehicle is unsurprising for numerous reasons. For one, thing, the outfit, spearheaded by famed former investment banker Mary Meeker — who left Kleiner with other alums of the firm including Mood Rowghani, Noah Knauf, Juliet de Baubigny, Daegwon Chae, and Paul Vronksky — has been adding to its investing roster.

Most notably, late last year the firm brought aboard Jay Simons to lead its global enterprise practice. Simons knows a thing or two about scaling a business as the former president of Atlassian, the maker of business development and collaboration software that went public in 2015 at a $4.3 billion valuation and now boasts a market cap of nearly $57 billion. (Simons joined the outfit in 2008 as its VP of sales and was promoted to president three years later, spending the next nine years in that role before leaving last summer.) According to LinkedIn, the firm has separately hired a more junior investor, Alex Knight, a Yale graduate and former Stanford business school student who is based in New York.

Bond’s team has also backed the kinds of brands that institutional investors like to see in a portfolio, with growth-stage bets while at Kleiner that include Slack, Uber, Snap and Waze, and current stakes through Bond in some other big and growing businesses around the world. Among these is Byju’s of India, which is among the world’s largest ed tech companies and whose founder wants to take the company public in the next year or two; the London-based online bank Revolut, which was valued at $5.5 billion by private investors as of a year ago and said last month it eventually aims to go public via a traditional U.S. IPO; and Canva, the Australia-based design platform for non-designers that was valued at $6 billion during its last funding round in June of last year.

Of course, a third reason that Bond is raising so much capital ties to the large amount of money still sloshing around in the market and which seems more eager than ever to find its way into late-stage deals, particularly as more companies are being brought into the public market at jaw-dropping valuations.

One of Bond’s portfolio companies, for example, Nextdoor, was last valued by private investors at $2.2 billion back in 2019. According to Bloomberg, the company, which has raised $470 million altogether, began considering options to go public several months ago at a valuation in the range of $4 billion to $5 billion.

Altogether, Bond appears to have used its first fund to invest in roughly 20 companies. Among its newest bets is Locus Robotics, a nearly seven-year-old, Wilmington, Ma.-based company that makes autonomous mobile robots for warehouses and that announced $150 million in Series E funding at a post-money valuation of $1 billion last month co-led by Tiger Global Management and Bond.

According to a December report in The Information, Bond also led the newest round for portfolio company Ironclad, which develops software that helps companies such as Dropbox and MasterCard create and manage business contracts. According to The Information, Bond led a Series D round of at least $100 million for the company at a post-investment valuation of more than $950 million, more than double its valuation from late 2019.