Author: azeeadmin

Soon, your cloud photo backups could reside on beams of light transmitted between satellites instead of in huge, power-hungry server farms here on Earth. Startup LyteLoop has spent the past five years doing tackling the physics challenges that can make that possible, and now it’s raised $40 million to help it leapfrog the remaining engineering hurdles to make its bold vision a reality.

LyteLoop’s new funding will provide it with enough runway to achieve its next major milestone: putting three prototype satellites equipped with its novel data storage technology into orbit within the next three years. The company intends to build and launch six of these, which will demonstrate how its laser-based storage medium operates on orbit.

I spoke to LyteLoop CEO Ohad Harlev about the company’s progress, technology and plans. Harlev said five years into its founding, the company is very confident in the science that underlies its data storage methods – and thrilled about the advantages it could offer over traditional data warehousing technology used today. Security, for instance, gets a big boost from LyteLoop’s storage paradigm.

“Everybody on every single data center has the same same possible maximum level of data security,” he said. “We can provide an extra four layers of cyber security, and they’re all physics-based. Anything that can be applied on Earth, we can apply in our data center, but for example, the fact that we’re storing data on photons, we could put in quantum encryption, which others can’t. Plus, there are big security benefits because the data is in motion, in space, and moving at the speed of light.”

On top of security, LyteLoop’s model also offers benefits when it comes to privacy, because the data it’s storing is technically always in transit between satellites, which means it’ll be subject to an entirely different set of regulations vs. those that come into play when you’re talking about data which is warehoused on drives in storage facilities. LyteLoop also claims advantages in terms of access, because the storage and the network are one in the same, with the satellites able to provide their information to ground stations anywhere on Earth. Finally, Harlev points out that it’s incredibly power efficient, and also ecologically sound in terms of not requiring million of gallons of water for cooling, both significant downsides of our current data center storage practices.

On top of all of that, Harlev says that LyteLoop’s storage will not only be cost-competitive with current cloud-based storage solutions, but will in fact be more affordable – even without factoring in likely decreases to come in launch costs as SpaceX iterates on its own technology and more small satellite launch providers, including Virgin Orbit and Rocket Lab, come online and expand their capacity.

“Although it’s more expensive to build and launch the satellite, it is still a lot cheaper to maintain them in the space,” he said. “So when we do a total cost of ownership calculation, we are cheaper, considerably cheaper, on a total cost of ownership basis. However […] when we compare what the actual users can do, you know, we can definitely go to completely different pricing model.”

Harlev is referring to the possibility of bundled pricing for combining storage and delivery – other providers would require that you supply the network, for instance, in order to move the data you’re storing. LyteLoop’s technology could also offset existing spend on reducing a company’s carbon footprint, because of its much-reduced ecological impact.

The company is focused squarely on getting its satellites to market, with a plan to take its proof of concept and expand that to a full production satellite roughly five years form now, with an initial service offering made available at that time. But LyteLoop’s tech could have equally exciting applications here on Earth. Harlev says that if you created a LyteLoop data center roughly the size of a football field, it would be roughly 500 times as efficient at storing data vs. traditional data warehousing.

The startup’s technology, which essentially stores data on photons instead of physical media, just requires far less matter than do our current ways of doing things, which not only helps its environmental impact, but which also makes it a much more sensible course for in-space storage when compared to physical media. The launch business is all about optimizing mass to orbit in order to reduce costs, and as Harlev notes, photons are massless.

SplashLearn, a 10-year-old U.S.-headquartered edtech startup that teaches children through a game-based curriculum, has raised $18 million in a new financing round as it looks to expand to more markets.

San Francisco-based Owl Ventures led the Series C funding round in SplashLearn, and Accel, which had earlier invested $7 million in the startup’s Series B, also participated in the new round.

In an interview with TechCrunch, SplashLearn co-founder and chief executive Arpit Jain said one of the biggest hurdles the education system faces today is that kids do not wish to learn, so you have to broach the subject in a way they find engaging.

His startup offers math and reading courses to students in pre-kindergarten to grade five. It has developed, with guidance from teachers and other experts, over 4,000 games and other interactive activities to explain various concepts to the children.

In a demo, Jain showed an adventure game that was riddled with hurdles. A kid needed to visually apply the concept of addition to progress forward in the game. “When the kids are engaged, there is improvement in their learning outcome,” said Jain.

SplashLearn platform additionally provides 15 minutes to 20 minutes of personalized learning experience to each student every day, he said.

The startup charges $12 a month to parents for its service. Alternatively, the service is free for schools. Currently, one in every three schools in the United States use SplashLearn, Jain said.

“One of our goals has been to make quality education available to students for free. Our business model has enabled us to work on this,” he said. SplashLearn doesn’t reach out to schools, he said. Teachers use our platform, and if they like the offering, they make the case for wider adoption at the school, said Jain, who like the other three co-founders, is an alumni of IIT Kharagpur.

The team first created an edtech platform that was similar to what Coursera has evolved into over the past decade. But their previous venture failed to gain traction as the Indian market, which had fewer than 50 million internet users then, wasn’t ready for it, said Jain.

SplashLearn today caters to more than 40 million registered students on its platform, 10 million of whom joined last year as the coronavirus shut schools worldwide. More than 750,000 teachers have also joined the platform.

The startup is currently largely serving students in the United States, which accounts for 80% of its revenue. But students from over 150 other markets, including the UK, Australia, Canada and India use the platform today.

“SplashLearn is well poised to bring about a distinct change in the digital learning space with its unique blend of scientifically designed curriculum and its pedagogical methods with global appeal. SplashLearn fits into our objective of supporting innovative companies in the edtech space, helping drive a paradigm shift in the way education is imparted, bringing it to scale,” said Amit A. Patel Managing Director, Owl Ventures, in a statement. Patel is joining the SplashLearn’s board along with Abhinav Chaturvedi, a partner at Accel.

Last year, SplashLearn also started a tutoring service for kids, where teachers teach a group of three to five students. This service costs $10 to $25 an hour. “Even at this cost, we are offering the service at a fraction of what it would cost students in a private tuition,” he said.

The tutoring service is currently available in the U.S., and Jain said the startup plans to grow it within the country this year.

The lead data supervisor for a slew of tech giants in the European Union, including Apple, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, TikTok and Twitter, is still relying on Lotus Notes to manage complaints and investigations lodged under the bloc’s flagship General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), per freedom of information requests made by the Irish Council for Civil Liberties (ICCL).

Back in its 2016 annual report Ireland’s Data Protection Commission (DPC) stated that one of its main goals for GDPR (and ePrivacy) readiness included “implementation of a new website and case-management system” in time for the regulation coming into force in May 2018. However some five years later this ITC upgrade project is still a work in progress, responses to the ICCL’s FOIs show.

Project deadlines were repeatedly missed, per internal documents now in the public domain, while by October 2020 the cost of the DPC’s ICT upgrade had more than doubled vs an initial projection — ballooning to at least €615,121 (a figure that excludes staff time spent on the project since 2016; and also does not include the cost of maintaining the antiquated Lotus Notes system which is borne by the Irish government’s Department of Justice).

The revelation that the lead data supervisor for much of big tech in Europe is handling complaints using such ‘last-gen’ software not only looks highly embarrassing for the DPC but raises questions over the effectiveness of its senior management.

The DPC continues to face criticism over the slow pace of regulatory enforcement vis-a-vis big tech which, combined with the GDPR’s one-stop-shop mechanism, has led to a huge backlog of cases that the European Commission has conceded is a weakness of the regulation. So the revelation that it’s taking so long to get its own ITC in order will only fuel criticism that the regulator is not fit for purpose.

The wider issue here is the vast gulf in resources and technical expertise between tech giants, many of which are racking up vast profits off of people’s data that they can use to put toward paying armies of in-house lawyers to shield them from the risk of regulatory intervention, vs the tiny, under-resourced public sector agencies tasked with defending users’ rights — without appropriately modern tools to help them do the job.

In Ireland’s case, though, the length of time involved in overhauling its internal ICT does throw the spotlight on management of resources. Not least because the DPC’s budget and headcount has been growing since around 2015, as more resource have been allocated to it to reflect GDPR coming into application.

The ICCL is calling for the Irish government to consider hiring two additional commissioners — to supplement the current (sole) commissioner, Helen Dixon, who was appointed to the role back in 2014.

It notes that Irish law allows for the possibility of having three commissioners.

“The people who are supposed to make sure that Facebook and Google do not misuse the information that they have about each of us, are using a system so antiquated that one former staff member told me it is ‘like attempting to use an abacus to do payroll’,” Dr Johnny Ryan, an ICCL senior fellow, told TechCrunch.

The DPC is not configured for its digital mission,” he added in a statement. “What we have discovered indicates that it cannot run critically important internal technology projects. How can it be expected to monitor what the world’s biggest tech firms do with our data? This raises serious questions not only for the DPC, but for the Irish Government. We have alerted the Irish Government of the strategic economic risk from failing to enforce the GDPR.”

Reached for comment, the DPC told us it has a “functional and fit-for-purpose” Case Management System which it said has been “optimised with new features over the last number of years (including with capability for the generation of statistics and management reports)”.

But it conceded the system is “dated” and “limited” in terms of how much it can be adapted for integration with a new DPC website and web forms and the IMI [information systems management] shared platform used between EU data protection authorities — given that it’s based on Lotus Notes technology. 

“Significant work in specifying the system and building its core modules has been completed,” deputy commission Graham Doyle said. “Some delays in delivery have occurred because of updates to specification of security and infrastructure elements. Some other elements have on demand from the DPC been slowed in order to allow for the resolution between EU DPAs of final intended processes such as those involved in the Article 60 cooperation and consistency mechanism under the GDPR.

“The EDPB [European Data Protection Board] is only now preparing internal guidance on the operationalisation of Article 60 and further on the dispute resolution mechanism under Article 65. These are key features of work between EU DPAs that require hand-offs between systems. In addition, the EU almost 3 years after it intended to has not yet adopted its new e-Privacy legislation. Further, the DPC alongside all other EU DPAs is learning how the procedural and operational aspects of the GDPR are to operate in fine detail and some of them remain to be settled.”

Doyle added that “progress continues” on the new Case Management System investment — saying it’s the DPC’s intention that “initial core modules” of the new system will be rolled out in Q2 2021.

To date, Ireland’s regulator has only issued one decision pertaining to a cross-border GDPR complaint: In December when it fined Twitter $550k over a security breach the company had publicly disclosed in January 2019.

Disagreement between Ireland and other EU DPAs over its initial enforcement proposal added months more to the decision process — and the DPC was finally forced to increase its suggested penalty by up to a few thousand euros following a majority vote.

The Twitter case was hardly smooth sailing but it actually represents a relatively rapid turnaround compared to the seven+ years involved in a separate (2013) complaint (aka Schrems II) — related to Facebook’s international data transfers which predates the GDPR.

With that complaint the DPC chose to go to court to raise concerns about the legality of the data transfer mechanism itself rather than acting on a specific complaint over Facebook’s use of Standard Contractual Clauses. A referral to the European Court of Justice followed and the EU’s highest court ended up torpedoing a flagship data transfer arrangement between the EU and the US.

Despite its legal challenge resulting in the EU-US Privacy Shield being struck down, the DPC still hasn’t pulled the plug on Facebook’s EU transfers. Although last September it did issue a preliminary suspension order — which Facebook immediately challenged (and blocked, temporarily) via judicial review.

Last year the DPC settled a counter judicial review of its processes, brought by the original complainant, agreeing to swiftly finalize the complaint — although a decision is still likely months out. But should finally come this year.

The DPC defends itself against accusations of enforcement foot-dragging by saying it must follow due process to ensure its decisions stand up to legal challenge.

But as criticism of the unit continues to mount revelations that its own flagship internal ICT upgrade is dragging on some five years after it was stated as a DPC priority will do nothing to silence critics.

Last week the EU parliament’s civil liberties committee issued a draft motion calling on the Commission to begin infringement proceedings against against Ireland “for not properly enforcing the GDPR”.

In the statement it wrote of “deep concern” that several complaints against breaches of the GDPR have not yet been decided by the Irish DPC despite GDPR coming into application in May 2018.

The LIBE committee also flagged the Schrems II Facebook transfers case — writing that it is concerned this case “was started by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner, instead taking a decision within its powers pursuant to Article 58 GDPR”.

It’s also notable that the Commission’s latest plans for updating pan-EU platform regulations — the Digital Services Act and Digital Markets Act — propose to side-step the risk of enforcement bottlenecks by suggesting that key enforcement against the largest platforms should be brought in-house to avoid the risk of any single Member State agency standing in the way of cross-border enforcement of European citizens’ data rights, as continues to happen with the GDPR.

Another quirk in relation to the Irish DPC is that the unit is not subject to the full range of freedom of information law. Instead the law only applies in respect of records concerning “the general administration of the Commission”. This means that its “supervisory, regulatory, consultation, complaint-handling or investigatory functions (including case files) are not releasable under the Act”, as it notes on its website.

Freedom of information requests filed by TechCrunch last year — asking the DPC how many times it has used GDPR powers to impose a temporary or absolute ban on data processing — were refused by the regulator on these grounds.

Its refusal to disclose whether or not it has ever asked an infringing entity to stop processing personal data cited the partial coverage of FOI law, saying that ‘general administration’ only refers to “records which have to do with the management of an FOI body such as records referring to personnel, pay matters, recruitment, accounts, information technology, accommodation, internal organization, office procedures and the like”.

While Ireland’s FOI law prevents closer scrutiny of the DPC’s activities the agency’s enforcement record speaks for itself.

 

There’s been a profusion of startups emerging in the last year around the concept of rolling up smaller e-commerce businesses — operations that mainly sell and distribute their products on marketplace platforms like Amazon’s — using economies of scale to bring them together to run and grow them more efficiently.

Today, one of the latest of these, Branded Group, is coming out of stealth with a significant round of funding. The company has picked up $150 million and says that since quietly opening for business in mid-2020 it has already acquired 20 startups in categories like home, leisure and lifestyle across Europe, United States, and Asia.

The idea is that while the companies it acquires will continue to be sold and distributed via Amazon’s B2B service Fulfilled by Amazon (they are often referred to as FBA businesses), Branded will help with things like marketing, financing, operations expertise and technology to manage the business, provide business analytics and intelligence and so on.

The funding is being led by Target Global, which is being described as a “co-founder” of the startup, alongside the other two co-founders Pierre Poignant and Michael Ronen.

Other investors in the round include Declaration Partners, Tiger Global, Kreos Capital, Lurra Capital, Regah Ventures, Kima Ventures, and Vine Ventures, as well as individual investments from Marc Pincus (Founder of Zynga), Jon Oringer (Founder of Shutterstock), and a dozen other execs who have worked at retail giants like Amazon, Walmart, Alibaba and Lazada.

Branded is not disclosing the names of the 20 companies it has acquired — we have asked — but it claims to include some of the biggest companies selling home, leisure, and lifestyle products on Amazon.

Branded said they collectively generate $150 million in gross revenues annually. (This is the amount in sales prior to any cost-of-sale deductions, so not net revenue or nor profit.)

And in a market where reviews (for what they are worth) are one of the key levers in convincing shoppers to buy one similar-looking product (sometimes the exact same product, in fact) over another, Branded says that its sellers have amassed a whopping 700,000 reviews.

One reason that Branded may not be talking about specific names in its stable is to keep some competitive strategic advantage, because the landscape of companies building roll-up outfits to bring smaller e-commerce businesses together is getting crowded very fast.

At the end of January, Berlin Brands Group — which itself is profitable and has not raised significant outside funding, yet — announced it would use $300 million+ off its balance sheet to by smaller companies. That came on the heels of U.S. competitor Thrasio raising $500 million in debt to use to buy companies, as well as significant rounds in the several months for SellerX, Heyday, Heroes, Perch and more.

There is well over $1 billion in capital swimming around now among startups looking to be the consolidator-in-chief among smaller sellers, who have build fledging businesses leaning on efficient marketplace services for marketing, distribution and logistics to get their products to buyers, but may not have bigger strategies for how to operate them in the longer term, or to grow them.

In that mix, though, there are some interesting details about the founders of Branded that speak to why it has attracted so much funding so soon, and the company’s potential ability to leverage that into a bigger business.

Poignant was the co-founder of Lazada — the Asia-based Amazon clone backed by Rocket Internet, Alibaba and others — while Ronen was previously a managing partner at SoftBank’s Vision Fund in the U.S. (he left almost exactly a year ago, after the fund had started to come under a lot of scrutiny). Branded’s pitch is that it can use that expertise in building online businesses to grow its stable of sellers and brands better than they might be able to do on their own.

“We are excited to leverage our e-commerce and business-building experience to create this next-generation multi-brand platform,” said Mr. Poignant in a statement. “Our team will provide unmatched operations, marketing, business development and supply chain expertise, serving as the partner of choice for entrepreneurs worldwide to scale their consumer brands and delight consumers on Amazon and beyond. Our global footprint, our team’s experience in scale-up growth, our strong access to capital, as well as the proprietary analytical tools and business intelligence capabilities we are building, uniquely position us to exponentially grow the best brands out there.”

The opportunity is a big one, it seems. It is estimated that there are some 5 million smaller sellers on Amazon’s Marketplace, making up about half of all sales on the platform.

Similar to the other companies that are hoping to make a splash in the area of consolidating some of them, the pitch from Branded is that it’s able to find the most interesting of these to partner or buy in brands to help run them more efficiency and scale them to the next levels of growth.

That opportunity appears to be a particularly keen one at the moment. The global health pandemic has led to a huge shift towards online shopping, with consumers either choosing or being forced to use the internet to buy goods and services as regions enact lockdown orders or in other cases encourage people to stay away from crowded places to slow the spread of Covid-19.

That’s spelled a lot of activity for retailers selling on digital platforms, although as a Perch founders once described it, not all sellers are prepared for or interested in exploring how to handle that kind of growth. That is the scenario that startups like Branded are hoping to tap, giving them a chance to grow a stable of brands on the back of proven consumer demand.

“Covid-19 has been a massive accelerator of consumers’ continuing shift to online shopping. We see fundamental changes in consumer behavior and purchase decision-making opening an opportunity to build a new type of consumer products leader with a digital-first mindset,” said Ben Kaminski, partner at Target Global who is also a co-founded at Branded as well as chairman of the board, in a statement. “Target Global has been a proud co-founder and investor in Branded. We are excited to jointly realize this unique opportunity, while becoming a home for some of the most talented sellers and entrepreneurs seeking to take their brands to the next level. I am excited to work with Pierre and Michael to realize Branded’s full potential.”

For now, it seems that Branded’s focus is mainly on Amazon — which remains the biggest company of its kind in the U.S. and has a strong presence in a number of other countries — but it’s notable that others in the space like Berlin Brands Group are looking beyond it for other marketplaces and even opportunities in direct-to-consumer brands that sell through their own sites to bring into the bigger roll-up strategy.

“Thanks to Amazon’s incredible investment in global logistics and leading technology, there are millions of third-party sellers worldwide on the Amazon marketplace,” said Mr. Ronen in a statement. “We are facing a generational opportunity to build Branded into the leading, digital-first consumer product goods (CPG) e-commerce platform, distilling the best among the $300 billion in revenue generated by businesses already thriving on Amazon’s marketplace. We will look to partner with and enable the most successful founders of high-potential brands to scale their operations globally.”

Finch Capital, the early-stage fintech VC with a presence in London and Amsterdam, has raised a third fund. Targeting a final close of €150 million, the fund has already secured €85 million from LPs ready to deploy.

Out of Finch Capital “Europe III,” the VC will invest in fintech startups at the Series A and B stages, deemphasising its previous inclusion of seed. Specifically, it says it is on the lookout for “European category leaders,” and in particular those leveraging AI with €2-5 million in revenues — a company profile, the firm argues, that is currently seeing a funding gap. Noteworthy, in early 2020, Finch Capital added Google and DeepMind alum Steve Crossan as a venture partner.

As with its previous funds, Finch plans to back 15-20 European startups over the next three years, and candidly reveals it’s targeting liquidity (i.e. exits) “3-5 years post investment”.

“Although we have a relatively good hit rate on seed deals, the overall impact on the fund is small, as we have made the best returns on deals with €2-5 million in revenues,” Radboud Vlaar, MD Finch Capital, tells me. “This plays to our sweet spot as a team, to leverage our network to help companies to scale, which is harder in the earlier stages when the companies look for product market fit”.

On a potential funding gap, Vlaar says there is a lot of early-stage capital going to companies with €0.5-2 million in revenue, with the aim to get to €5 million and beyond in revenue quickly. And there is also a lot of capital chasing companies with €5-10 million in revenue. “In reality, B2B takes time and many companies are not growing linearly,” he observes. “They might have to adapt the team, strategy etc., on the way to cracking the market.

In addition, most of the U.S. or European growth firms prefer to see signs of a “winner takes all” market, which in Europe, due to its fragmented landscape, is more the exception than the rule, with a greater proportion of €100-500 million exits.

This means that Finch is seeing promising companies with “great products” that are facing a funding gap at €2-5 million in revenue, which the VC aims to plug. “Our strategy is fairly dynamic in terms of ownership but specific in terms of theme: we can aspire for 30-40% in certain companies as well as the more traditional stake of 15-25%,” adds Vlaar.

Meanwhile, Finch’s current portfolio spans pure-play fintech, regtech and insurtech, and includes Trussle, Fourthline, Goodlord, Grab, Hiber, BUX, Twisto and Zopa. Exits include Salviol and Cermati, plus two exits currently unannounced or in progress.

In 2020 the firm launched “Flowrence,” its machine learning tool to help source and manage deal flow. Finch says that over the last SIX months, 20% of its shortlisted deals were sourced by Flowrence, especially useful during the current pandemic.

Hoxton Farms, a U.K. startup that wants to produce animal fat without using animals, has raised £2.7 million in seed funding.

The round is led by Founders Fund, the Silicon Valley venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel. Also participating is Backed, Presight Capital, CPT Capital and Sustainable Food Ventures.

Still at the R&D stage, Hoxton Farms says it will use the funding to grow its interdisciplinary science team in a new purpose-built lab in London’s Old Street. “[We] will be working towards a scalable prototype of our cultivated fat over the next year to 18 months,” co-founder and mathematician Ed Steele tells me.

He started the company with longtime school friend Dr Max Jamilly, who has two degrees in biotechnology and a PhD in synthetic biology (the pair met at pre-school). “I spent my PhD using a genome editing technology called CRISPR to discover better treatments for children’s leukaemia,” says Jamilly. “Along the way, I learnt how to grow complex cells at scale — a fundamental part of the scientific challenge that we face at Hoxton Farms”.

Like other companies in the meat alternative space, the startup is founded on the premise that the traditional meat industry is unsustainable. This is seeing demand for meat alternatives soaring, but, argues Steele, these products still aren’t good enough. “They don’t taste right and they aren’t healthy. They are missing the key ingredient: fat,” he says. And, of course, it’s fat that gives meat most of its flavour.

However, meat alternatives typically use plant oils as a fat replacement, which has a number of drawbacks. Some oils are bad for the environment, such as coconut and palm oil, and most lack flavour.

“At Hoxton Farms, we grow real animal fat without the animals,” explains Steele. “Starting from just a few cells, we grow purified animal fat in bioreactors to produce cultivated fat, a cruelty-free and sustainable ingredient that will finally unlock meat alternatives that look, cook and taste like the real thing”.

Furthermore, he says that current techniques for culturing animal cells are too expensive. Hoxton Farms is using mathematical and computational modelling to “massively reduce the cost of cell culture,” which the company believes will result in a production process “that is cost-effective at scale”.

“We’re combining the latest techniques from computational biology and tissue engineering to do science that wasn’t possible a few years ago,” says Steele. “What sets us apart is the fundamental philosophy that the only way to grow cells cost-effectively at scale is to combine the power of mathematical modelling with synthetic biology”.

It’s envisioned that his computational approach will not only help it compete with other companies working on the same problem — competitors include Mission Barns in the U.S. and Peace of Meat in Belgium/Israel — but also enable it to customise fats for different manufacturers. This could include fine tuning the taste profile, physical properties (melting temperature, density, etc.) and nutritional profile (saturated/unsaturated fatty acid ratio etc.).

Meanwhile, Hoxton Farms’ early customers will be plant-based meat companies who seek a more sustainable and flavoursome alternative to plant oils. Much further into the future, the startup will target cultivated meat companies that grow muscle cells but still need a source of fat, and other industries, such as bakery, confectionery and cosmetics.

Tesla, which is seeing rapid growth in China as it ramps up local manufacturing capacity, has been called upon by the Chinese government for talks over quality issues in its electric cars.

A group of Chinese authorities, including the country’s top market regulator, cyberspace watchdog and transportation authority, held talks with Tesla after consumers complained about acceleration irregularities, battery fire, software upgrade failures and other vehicle problems, according to a government notice posted late Monday.

Tesla said on microblogging platform Weibo that it “sincerely accepts the government departments’ guidance” and will “strictly comply with Chinese laws.” It will also work to strengthen its “internal operational structure and workflow” under the direction of the regulators in order to ensure safety and consumer rights.

While its popularity surged in China over the past few years, Tesla has made a series of recalls due to faulty parts or functions in the country. Just before its meeting with the government, the American EV giant recalled 20,428 imported Model S vehicles and 15,698 units of imported Model X, China’s market regulator announced last week.

China is an increasingly important and the second-largest market for Tesla. The Gigafactory in Shanghai, where Tesla enjoys tax breaks granted by the local municipal government, has allowed the carmaker to localize procurement and production, thus driving down prices in products like Model 3.

China contributed $6.66 billion in revenue for Tesla in 2020, more than doubling the amount from a year before, and accounted for more than 20% of the firm’s total revenues, according to Tesla’s filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission this week. In 2019, China made up just around 10% of Tesla’s revenues.

Tesla is competing with a handful of well-financed and indigenous electric car startups in China such as Nio and Xpeng, which are both listed in the U.S. For comparison, Xpeng shipped a total of 27,041 vehicles in 2020, while Nio topped that with 43,728 units shipped. These numbers are still fractions of Tesla’s total delivery, which reached 499,647 vehicles in the year.

LanzaJet, the renewable jet fuel startup spun out from the longtime renewable and synthetic fuel manufacturer, LanzaTech, has inked a supply agreement with British Airways to supply the company with at least 7500 tons of fuel additive per yer.

The deal marks the second agreement between the UK-based airline and a renewable jet fuels manufacturer following an August 2019 agreement with the British company Velocys. It’s also LanzaJet’s second offtake agreement. The company announced itself with a partnership between the renewable fuels manufacturer and the Japanese airline ANA.

Through the deal, British Airways will invest an undisclosed amount in LanzaJet’s first commercial scale facility in Georgia. The fuel will being powering flights by the end of 2022 the companies said.

It’s part of a broader expansion effort that could see LanzaJet establish a commercial facility for the UK airline in its home country in the coming years.

Back in the U.S. the plan is to begin construction on the Georgia facility later this year which will convert ethanol into a jet fuel additive using a chemical process.

Fuel from the plant will reduce the overall greenhouse emissions by 70 percent versus traditional jet fuel. It’s the equivalent of taking almost 27,000 gasoline or diesel-powered cars of the orad each year, according to the company.

The deal is the culmination of years of research and development work between LanzaJet’s parent company, LanzaTech and Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Spun off in June 2020, LanzaJet was financed by an investment group including parent company LanzaTech, Mitsui, and Suncor Energy. British AIrways now joins the two other strategic investors as LanzaJet eyes an ambitious scale up program through 2025. The company plans to launch four large scale plants producing a pipeline of renewable fuels. 

“Low-cost, sustainable fuel options are critical for the future of the aviation sector  and the LanzaJet process offers the most flexible feedstock solution at scale, recycling wastes and  residues into SAF that allows us to keep fossil jet fuel in the ground. British Airways has long been a  champion of waste to fuels pathways especially with the UK Government,” said Jimmy Samartzis, the chief executive of LanzaJet. “With the right support for  waste-based fuels, the UK would be an ideal location for commercial scale LanzaJet plants. We look  forward to continuing the dialogue with BA and the UK Government in making this a reality, and to  continuing our support of bringing the Prime Minister’s Jet Zero vision to life.”  

The LanzaJet fuel is certified for commercial flight up to 50% blend with conventional kerosene. “Considering the aviation market is 90 billion gallons of jet fuel a year, having 50% or 45 billion of production capacity and reaching that max blend level will be a great problem to have,” said LanzaTech chief executive Jennifer Holmgren in an email.

LanzaJet’s manufacturing facility in Georgia is designed to produce zero-waste fuels, according to Holmgren, and British Airways will receive 7,500 tonnes of sustainable aviation fuel from LanzaJet’s biorefinery each year for the next 5 years.

The partnership between British Airways, Hangar 51, International Airlines Group’s accelerator and others.

In addition to its biofuel work, British Airways is also working with companies like ZeroAvia, the hydrogen fuels company that also received backing from Amazon, Shell, and Breakthrough Energy Ventures.

“For  the last 100 years we have connected Britain with the world and the world with Britain, and to  ensure our success for the next 100, we must do this sustainably,” said British Airways chief executive Sean Doyle. 

“Progressing the development and commercial deployment of sustainable aviation fuel is crucial to  decarbonising the aviation industry and this partnership with LanzaJet shows the progress British  Airways is making as we continue on our journey to net zero.”

 

Based in Bangladesh, Maya is dedicated to making it easier for women to get healthcare, especially for sensitive issues like reproductive and mental health. The startup announced today it has raised $2.2 million in seed funding. The round, which Maya said is the largest raised by a Bangladeshi health tech company so far, was led by early-stage fund Anchorless Bangladesh and The Osiris Group, a private equity firm focused on impact investing in Asian markets.

The funding will be used to introduce new products to Maya’s telehealth platform and expand into more countries. Maya recently launched in Sri Lanka and plans to expand into India, Pakistan, Middle Eastern markets and Indonesia.

Maya uses natural language processing and machine learning technology for its digital assistant, which answers basic health-related questions and decides if users need to be routed to human experts. It has about 10 million unique users and currently counts more than 300 licensed healthcare providers on its platform.

Founder and chief executive officer Ivy Huq Russell, who grew up in Chittagong and Dhaka before moving to the United Kingdom for university, started Maya as a blog with healthcare information in 2011. At the time, Russell worked in finance. She had just given birth to her first child and her mother had recently been diagnosed with breast cancer. Russell told TechCrunch she realized how many challenges there were to seeking medical care in Bangladesh, including financial barriers, a shortage of providers and long travel times to clinics.

She began Maya with the goal of providing trustworthy health information, but quickly realized that the site’s visitors needed more support. Many sent messages through WhatsApp, email or the site’s chat box, including survivors of sexual abuse, rape and domestic violence. After receiving a grant from BRAC, a Bangladeshi non-governmental organization, Maya’s team began developing an app to connect users with medical information and experts.

“We were very focused on two things,” Russell said. “One is how do we built trust in our community, in their language, because it’s very important that they communicate in the language that they’re comfortable using. At the same time, we realized as soon as we started getting hundreds and hundreds of questions, that we’re not going to be able to scale up if we just have 50 experts on computers typing.”

To support Bengali and regional dialects, Maya spent more than two years focused on developing its natural language processing technology. It collaborated with data scientists and linguists and took part in Google Launchpad’s accelerator program, working on tokenization and training its machine learning algorithms. Now Maya is able to provide automated answers in Bengali to basic questions in 50 topics with about 95% accuracy, Russell said. Out of the four million queries the platform has handled so far, about half were answered by its AI tech.

Many have to do with sexual or reproductive health and the platform has also seen an increase in questions about mental health. These are topics users are often hesitant seeking in-person consultations for.

“Growing up in Bangladesh, we got minimum sexual education. There’s no curriculum at school. Recently in the last one or two years, we’ve also started to see a lot of mental health questions, because I think we’ve made a good drive toward talking about mental health,” said Russell. She added, “it’s quite natural that whatever they couldn’t go and ask a question about very openly in traditional healthcare systems, they come and ask us.”

More consultations are coming from men, too, who now make up about 30% of Maya’s users. Many ask questions about birth control and family planning, or how to support their partners’ medical issues. To protect users’ privacy, consultations are end-to-end encrypted, and experts only see a randomly-generated ID instead of personal information.

In order to understand if someone needs to be routed to a human expert, Maya’s algorithms considers the length, complexity and urgency of queries, based on their tone. For example, if someone types “please, please, please help me,” they automatically get directed to a person. The majority of questions about mental health are also sent to an expert.

Russell said Maya’s approach is to take a holistic approach to physical health and mental wellness, instead of treating them as separate issues.

“People don’t just ask about physical health issues. They also ask things like, ‘I wear a hijab and I want to go for a run, but I feel really awkward,'” said Russell. “It sounds like a very normal question, but it’s actually quite a loaded question, because it’s affecting their mental health on a day-to-day basis.”

One of the company’s goals is to make the app feel accessible, so people feel more comfortable seeking support. “We’ve literally have had sweets delivered to our office when a user has a baby,” Russell said. “These are the personal touches that I think Maya has delivered in terms of dealing with both physical as well as mental health conditions combined together.”

The company is currently working with different monetization models. One is business-to-business sales, positioning Maya as a software-as-a-service platform that employers can offer to workers as a benefit. Garment manufacturing is one of Bangladesh’s biggest export sectors, and many workers are young women, fitting Maya’s typical user profile. The startup has worked with Marks and Spencer, Primark and the Bangladesh Garments Manufacturer and Exporters Association (BGMEA).

Another B2B route is partnering with insurance providers who offer Maya as a benefit. On the direct-to-consumer side, Maya recently launched premium services, including in-app video consultations and prescription delivery. Demand for consultations increased sharply during the COVID-19 pandemic, and it now handles about 300,000 video visits a month. Russell expects many users to continue using telehealth services even after the pandemic subsides.

“They’ve really seen the advantage of just having a doctor right in front of you,” she said. “For people with chronic conditions, it’s easier because they don’t have to go somewhere every week, and the fact they have monitoring and their history gathered is helpful for regular users, too.”

Reddit has raised a new funding round, totalling $250 million. This is the company’s Series E round of financing, and it comes hot on the heels of renewed public attention on the site that has dubbed itself ‘the front page of the Internet,’ owing to the role the subreddit r/WallStreetBets played in the recent meteoric rise (and subsequent steep fall) of the value of GameStop stock. Reddit also ran a 5-second Super Bowl ad on Sunday, consisting of. a single static image that looked like a standard post on the network itself.

This is Reddit’s 16th year of operation, and the company has raised around $800 million to date, including a Tencent-led $300 million Series D in February, 2019. Today’s round including financing from “existing and new investors,” Reddit noted in a blog post in which it announced the funding. In the post, Reddit notes that the company felt “now was the right opportunity to make strategic investments in Reddit including video, advertising, consumer products and expanding into international markets.”

It’s unclear how the round came together exactly, but given the network’s time in the spotlight over the past few weeks, culminating in yesterday’s very brief, but also very memorable and high-profile ad, it seems likely it was at least finalized fast in order to help the company make the most of its time in the spotlight. In terms of what kind of specific moves Reddit could make with its new cash on hand, the blog post also namecheck its acquisition late last year of short video sharing platform Dubsmash, and announced plans to double its team over the course of this year with new hires.

Reddit’s long history has also included some significant tumult, and efforts to clean up its act in order to present a better face to advertisers, and to potential new community members. The network still struggles with balancing its commitments to fostering a home for a range of communities with the potential for hate speech and discrimination to take root within some of these, and it was also in the news earlier this year for finally banning controversial subreddit r/donaldtrump following “repeat´d policy violations” surrounding the attempted insurrection a the U.S. Capitol by a mob of domestic terrorists.