Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Big tech has responded to the mammoth antitrust report put out by the U.S. House Judiciary Committee yesterday with blanket denials there’s any monopolistic behaviour or competitive imbalances to see here.

Here’s a quick run down of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google’s rebuttals.

Amazon

In a lengthy but punchy blog post the ecommerce giant brands the committee’s views on antitrust “fringe notions” and “regulatory spitballing” — lathering on dire predictions of doom for small business and hoards of inflated-price-enraged consumers should lawmakers deign to dabble in any “misguided interventions”.

Sample quote:

The flawed thinking would have the primary effect of forcing millions of independent retailers out of online stores, thereby depriving these small businesses of one of the fastest and most profitable ways available to reach customers. For consumers, the result would be less choice and higher prices. Far from enhancing competition, these uninformed notions would instead reduce it.

The substance of Amazon’s argument against the need for antitrust intervention is the top-line claim that retail is “thriving and extraordinarily competitive” — with the tech giant saying it accounts for a tiny fraction of global retail and isn’t even the largest US retailer by revenues (that’s Walmart). Among the grab-bag of competitors Amazon lists as evidence that it’s a mere retail minnow are Best Buy, Costco, Facebook, Kroger, Google Shopping, Home Depot, Shopify and Target. (It doesn’t mention Whole Foods because it already consumed that competitor.)

The strategy here is to claim online and offline retail are just one giant market — because of course if lawmakers slice by online retail alone there’s no denying Amazon’s oversized punch.

Another chunk of rebuttal is against what it claims is “false narrative” that its own interests don’t align with “the thousands of small and medium-sized businesses thriving as sellers in our store”.

“The opposite is true: Amazon and sellers complement each other, and together we create a better customer experience than either could create alone,” it pouts, before going on to say SME sales account for around 60% of all physical products sold on its marketplace, and that it “typically” makes the same or more revenue on third-party sales — rubbishing the idea there could possibly be any conflict of interest at all from Amazon also selling own brand rival products on the same marketplace where only Amazon gets an overview of merchants’ data.

NB: European regulators aren’t so convinced about the lack of competitive risks on dual-sided platforms.  

Apple

Asked for its response to the committee report, Apple sent us an on the record statement in which it writes that it “vehemently” disagrees with the conclusions reached — adding the beautiful kicker to the sentence “with respect to Apple”. Epic trolling Tim.

It also said it would be issuing a more “extensive refutation” of the accusations levelled at its business in the coming days.

Here’s the rest of its statement:

Our company does not have a dominant market share in any category where we do business. From its beginnings 12 years ago with just 500 apps, we’ve built the App Store to be a safe and trusted place for users to discover and download apps and a supportive way for developers to create and sell apps globally. Hosting close to two million apps today, the App Store has delivered on that promise and met the highest standards for privacy, security and quality. The App Store has enabled new markets, new services and new products that were unimaginable a dozen years ago, and developers have been primary beneficiaries of this ecosystem. Last year in the United States alone, the App Store facilitated $138 billion in commerce with over 85% of that amount accruing solely to third-party developers. Apple’s commission rates are firmly in the mainstream of those charged by other app stores and gaming marketplaces. Competition drives innovation, and innovation has always defined us at Apple. We work tirelessly to deliver the best products to our customers, with safety and privacy at their core, and we will continue to do so.

In further background comments the gist of Apple’s argument boils down to ‘Don’t mess with a good thing’.

Aka billions of users across 175 countries can’t be wrong nor unhappy — nor can the tens of millions of developers making wares for its kit, given, for example, how many (1.8M) apps are now on the App Store. (Developers whose apps get excluded are unlikely to be so happy, of course.)

It also defends the 30% commission it takes on app sales — aka the ‘Apple tax’ — pointing to a recent study by Analysis Group that the structure is “similar in magnitude to those of other app stores and digital content marketplaces” — and further noting that for in-app subscriptions the tax falls to 15% after the first year.

Lastly it invokes privacy, pointing out that by reviewing apps and curating its users access to third party software it can offer protection from surveillance, as well as keep things clean by rejecting objectionable, harmful, unsafe, and illegal content.

Facebook

In a brief on the record statement — presumably while it prepares the next chapters of its neverending ‘hard questions‘ series of lobbyist ‘literature’ — the social media giant sought to paint its business success as American as apple pie or, er, the freely unfettered market.

Here’s what it told us in full, with remarks attributed to a faceless “Facebook spokesperson”:

Facebook is an American success story. We compete with a wide variety of services with millions, even billions, of people using them. Acquisitions are part of every industry, and just one way we innovate new technologies to deliver more value to people. Instagram and WhatsApp have reached new heights of success because Facebook has invested billions in those businesses. A strongly competitive landscape existed at the time of both acquisitions and exists today. Regulators thoroughly reviewed each deal and rightly did not see any reason to stop them at the time.

So, in sum, there’s absolutely nothing to see here but successful! business! as! usual! is Facebook’s wafer-thin claim. Sure, it bought and assimilated rival social media businesses that could have gained enough market share to challenge its dominance of the category but that’s also just totally great business! Moreover, Facebook buying those really successful rivals just made them even more great and successful! But not so great and successful that there isn’t also “strong” competition in the space Facebook has dominated for 15+ years through its sheer force of business success.

Of course Facebook’s statement makes no mention of Onavo: A VPN app it acquired and used to spy on rival app usage to figure out which apps it should be buying or, er, crushing via cloning their innovations — but that’s a whole other story Facebook isn’t at all keen to talk about for some reason. Ditto the whole paying teenagers to spy on them thing.

In any case, the social media behemoth concludes, it’s the regulators who really screwed up here because they didn’t stop it buying Instagram and WhatsApp when they could have done. So ya! boo! sucks! it’s too late suckers! (we paraphrase).

Google

We also reached out to Google for a response to the antitrust report. The adtech giant had a statement ready to go — which kicks off by emphasising how much value its “free” products pump into the economy (not to mention all the “billions” it throws at R&D), before going on to chide policymakers for making “outdated and inaccurate allegations”.

The statement also features what’s become a go-to tech giant talking point as antitrust has risen up the political agenda in recent years — which is the claim that breaking up Internet giants wouldn’t actually fix anything.

Rather, Google warns (taking a similar tack to Amazon), of economic ruin awaiting the US economy — even from a ‘lesser’ intervention of tinkering with the sacred protections enshrined in Section 230 — and geopolitical doom for America’s tech leadership (taking a similar tack to Facebook). Or, in other words, cut Google and American bleeds. But also, no we’re not a monopoly, hell no! We’re just a verrrry fleet-o-foot operator in a “highly competitive industry”. So, er, which is it?

Interestingly, Google is the only tech giant to include some soft soap for lawmakers in this first response to the antitrust committee report — writing that it “support[s] Congress focusing on areas where clearer laws would help consumers”. (Translation: Stick with the small stuff and leave the important moneymaking business stuff to big tech.)

Here it invokes interoperability (because what technology solutionist doesn’t love a technology ‘solution’ to a monopoly problem); as well as claimed support for passing “comprehensive federal privacy legislation”. (Because a weaker federal framework is the only way to unpick state-level privacy laws with teeth like CCPA).

Here’s Google’s statement in full:

Google’s free products like Search, Maps and Gmail help millions of Americans and we’ve invested billions of dollars in research and development to build and improve them. We compete fairly in a fast-moving and highly competitive industry. We disagree with today’s reports, which feature outdated and inaccurate allegations from commercial rivals about Search and other services.

Americans simply don’t want Congress to break Google’s products or harm the free services they use every day. The goal of antitrust law is to protect consumers, not help commercial rivals. Many of the proposals bandied about in today’s reports — whether breaking up companies or undercutting Section 230 — would cause real harm to consumers, America’s technology leadership and the U.S. economy — all for no clear gain.

We support Congress focusing on areas where clearer laws would help consumers, a few of which are mentioned in today’s reports: Google has long championed the importance of data portability and open mobile platforms; we are arguing a case before the Supreme Court tomorrow for the important principle of software interoperability; and we have urged Congress to pass comprehensive federal privacy legislation. We look forward to engaging with Congress on these and other issues moving forward.

TechCrunch’s Taylor Hatmaker contributed to this report 

Popular caller-identification service Truecaller has amassed 250 million monthly active users and 200 million daily active users, demonstrating an accelerated pace of growth in recent quarters even as a global pandemic has hurt most businesses, it said on Wednesday.

The service, run by eponymous Stockholm-headquartered firm, allows users to avoid spam calls by identifying the callers and also filters similar texts. The service is popular in many parts of the world, but India, where everyone receives dozens of such calls each month, is Truecaller’s biggest market.

Even as Apple and Google have improved the caller ID feature in their mobile operating systems in recent years and taken several other steps to curb spam calls, Truecaller’s offerings remain unmatched.

Truecaller had 200 million monthly active users in February this year, and it reached 100 million daily active users milestone in April 2018. More than 150 million of its monthly active user base are in India. In fact, Truecaller is the only app not made by Google or Facebook on the list of top 10 most used apps in the country, according to mobile insights firm App Annie (data of which an industry exec shared with TechCrunch).

In recent years, Truecaller has expanded its platform to add messaging and payments services. Earlier this year, the company launched a new product that allows businesses to authenticate users on their apps without giving them a call.

The 11-year-old, Sequoia Capital -backed firm is also preparing to go public within the next two years, its co-founder and chief executive Alan Mamedi told TechCrunch in an interview early this year.

On Wednesday, Truecaller also announced it has appointed Fredrik Kjell as its new Chief Operating Officer. Kjell previously served as Chief Product Officer at Kindred Group, an online gambling company.

“With Fredrik’s strong operational background from previous consumer companies, and vast experience in a large publicly traded company, we believe he will be a great addition to the company and the global executive team. We’re on an exciting journey to take Truecaller to the next level, and this is a great step towards it,” said Mamedi in a statement.

Language learning company Reverso is launching its desktop app for macOS and Windows. Like on mobile, it lets you access a translation dictionary and get examples in context. The company has attracted 40,000 downloads in two days.

While Google Translate is massively successful, Reverso has managed to attract 20 million downloads on iOS and Android. Most users come from France, Italy, Russia and the U.S. The company’s websites also attract tens of millions of unique visitors every month who generate over 500 million page views.

Thanks to the new desktop app, you can access Reverso more quickly when you’re using your computer. You can highlight a word or a few words in any app and search for those words in Reverso with a keyboard shortcut. It automatically switches to the app window with your query.

You can also access synonyms from the app and hear the pronunciation of a word. Like on mobile, the app is free and there’s an optional subscription to access more features.

In other news, Reverso recently launched Reverso Documents, a service that lets you upload your document and get a translation with your original layout. You can review and edit the translation before downloading your document. Behind the scene, the company has improved its neural machine translation technologies for this kind of products.

Reverso Documents supports Word, PowerPoint, PDF and Excel files. There are 50,000 people using Reverso Documents every month. You can pay a one-time fee or pay a subscription to access the service.

The company also works with corporate clients to help them translate user guides, internal guidelines and more. Companies can upload documents that have already been translated so that Reverso can learn about your specific vocabulary. Clients include banks and car manufacturers.

Reverso is diversifying its revenue beyond web ads. And the company has a large user base at the top of the funnel that could end up interacting with more Reverso products down the road.

Femtech hardware maker Elvie has added a softer, hands-free breast pump that uses natural suction to its portfolio two years after launching its debut ‘next-gen’ connected breast pump.

The Elvie Curve is described as “a wearable, silicone breast pump that allows for gentle hands-free expression when feeding or pumping from the other breast — or to express full breasts” — suggesting the UK-based startup intends for it to supplement the more expensive (and electronic) Elvie Pump.

The Elvie Curve is priced at RRP £49.99 vs around £250 for the Pump. The Pump is also slightly more capacious, holding up to 5 oz of milk compared to up to 4 oz for the Curve. The Curve is similarly designed to sit discreetly inside a bra.

As the Curve uses natural suction there’s no batteries (nor connectivity) involved. But Elvie says a valve lets the user control the suction strength — for a comfortable, low effort experience.

The startup has launched another new (non-connected) device today, called the Elvie Catch (RRP £29.99). This consists of a set of two slip-proof milk collection cups to prevent leaks, also designed to fit neatly inside a bra.

Elvie says the cups can be used “during feeding, pumping or on the go”.

“Unlike many other breast shells and nipple pads, Elvie Catch sits securely in a bra to prevent leaks and is reusable, collecting up to 1 oz of breastmilk per cup so nothing goes to waste,” it adds in a press release.

Last year the London-based startup raised a $42M Series B funding round, led by IPGL, which it said would be used to support the release of four additional women’s health products. (The company’s debut product was a connected pelvic floor exerciser, which it continues to sell as the Elvie Trainer.)

Commenting on its freshly expanded portfolio in a statement, CEO and co-founder, Tania Boler, said: “Elvie Curve and Elvie Catch mark the next steps in Elvie’s mission to modernise breastfeeding and pumping products so they fit into the lives of real, modern-day mums.

“We launched the silent, wireless and wearable Elvie Pump two years ago to make pumping a hands-free experience that empowers mums to pump on their own terms. But we know that the challenges of breastfeeding go beyond pumping.

“Breast milk is liquid gold, so these products are designed to make the most of every last drop – as well as fitting seamlessly (and discreetly) into the lives of mums, like all Elvie products!”

Both new products are slated as available to buy via Elvie’s website from today — but at the time of writing they’re listed as ‘wait list’ only.

Femtech hardware maker Elvie has added a softer, hands-free breast pump that uses natural suction to its portfolio two years after launching its debut ‘next-gen’ connected breast pump.

The Elvie Curve is described as “a wearable, silicone breast pump that allows for gentle hands-free expression when feeding or pumping from the other breast — or to express full breasts” — suggesting the UK-based startup intends for it to supplement the more expensive (and electronic) Elvie Pump.

The Elvie Curve is priced at RRP £49.99 vs around £250 for the Pump. The Pump is also slightly more capacious, holding up to 5 oz of milk compared to up to 4 oz for the Curve. The Curve is similarly designed to sit discreetly inside a bra.

As the Curve uses natural suction there’s no batteries (nor connectivity) involved. But Elvie says a valve lets the user control the suction strength — for a comfortable, low effort experience.

The startup has launched another new (non-connected) device today, called the Elvie Catch (RRP £29.99). This consists of a set of two slip-proof milk collection cups to prevent leaks, also designed to fit neatly inside a bra.

Elvie says the cups can be used “during feeding, pumping or on the go”.

“Unlike many other breast shells and nipple pads, Elvie Catch sits securely in a bra to prevent leaks and is reusable, collecting up to 1 oz of breastmilk per cup so nothing goes to waste,” it adds in a press release.

Last year the London-based startup raised a $42M Series B funding round, led by IPGL, which it said would be used to support the release of four additional women’s health products. (The company’s debut product was a connected pelvic floor exerciser, which it continues to sell as the Elvie Trainer.)

Commenting on its freshly expanded portfolio in a statement, CEO and co-founder, Tania Boler, said: “Elvie Curve and Elvie Catch mark the next steps in Elvie’s mission to modernise breastfeeding and pumping products so they fit into the lives of real, modern-day mums.

“We launched the silent, wireless and wearable Elvie Pump two years ago to make pumping a hands-free experience that empowers mums to pump on their own terms. But we know that the challenges of breastfeeding go beyond pumping.

“Breast milk is liquid gold, so these products are designed to make the most of every last drop – as well as fitting seamlessly (and discreetly) into the lives of mums, like all Elvie products!”

Both new products are slated as available to buy via Elvie’s website from today — but at the time of writing they’re listed as ‘wait list’ only.

In September 2020, Helsinki’s City Council approved plans for an expansion of the existing “Maria 01 Campus,” a former downtown hospital complex. Even before it starts spreading its acreage, the facility is already home to 120 startups and 12 venture capital funds. The campus is owned by the biggest startup conference in the Nordics, Slush, the City of Helsinki and Helsinki Enterprise Agency and is slated to become one of the largest, if not — possibly — the largest tech startup campus in Europe, at 70,000 square meters (or 75,3473 square feet) by 2023.

The scale of the project speaks to the confidence and ambition of the Helsinki startup ecosystem, which has grown immeasurably over the last 10-15 years.

The fact that Slush, a conference, is involved is no accident. The event is a nonprofit created by the university. This has enabled it to scale to one of Europe’s largest tech events (pre-COVID) at over 20,000 attendees. Its success has also led to traditionally conservative Finns embracing entrepreneurship. The entire city gets involved, and thousands of university students volunteer for the good of the city and the ecosystem. The collegiate nature of the Slush experience has reflected how Helsinki has grabbed the opportunities of tech with both hands.

Born of Aalto University and its student society for entrepreneurship, AaltoES, Slush originally started as a tech meetup. Indeed, I went to some of the first ones. But with the 2010’s success of local startup Rovio, creator of Angry Birds, as well as Supercell, creator of Clash of Clans, the event took off. It helped that Peter Vesterbacka (previously a pioneer at HP Bazaar Labs) was a tireless promoter of Slush and egged it on from being a meetup into a full-blown conference that could attract the biggest names in tech.

Slush’s ability to attract VCs to a Northern European country in the middle of winter was impressive. The city rolled out the red carpet. That meant inbound VC exploded. According to the Finnish Venture Capital Association (FVCA), VC investment into Finland grew almost five times to €188 million between 2014 and 2018. Finland is now a European leader in terms of venture capital (says the FVCA) as a percentage of GDP, and foreign VC investments grew by 58% between 2017-18.

VC has grown leaps and bounds in the city itself. Crunchbase lists 54 venture funds of various guises in Helsinki. They include Conor Venture Partners, Inventure, VNT Management, Icebreaker.vc, Superhero Capital, Evli Growth Partners, OpenOcean, Loudspring, Norsepower Oy, Tesi, NordicNinja VC and Maki.vc.

Slush has even seen ex-employees go on to found big startups. Food delivery startup Wolt, co-founded by Miki Kuusi an early CEO of Slush, has raised $160 million. Other big startup companies from Helsinki’s ecosystem include Smartly, Singa, Giosg, ZenRobotics and Blok. And let’s not forget it produced MySQL and CRF Health back in the day. In 2018, Small Giant Games, was acquired by Zynga in a deal worth up to $700 million.

Startup Genome marks out Helsinki as one of the top global ecosystems. For 2020, it valued the Helsinki startup ecosystem at $5.8 billion, with total early-stage funding of $511 million, higher than the global average for emerging ecosystems.

Helsinki has around 250 gaming enterprises and 30 of them exceed $1 million in annual sales. In 2017 Finland was the first EU country to publish a national AI strategy and the University of Helsinki created a free AI education program that saw approximately 90,000 people from 80 different countries enroll in the first four months.

Over the whole country, nearly 300,000 Finns work in tech, an enormous amount when you consider the population of Helsinki is 1.3 million.

According to analysts Tracxn top startups include:

• Canatu (transparent conductive films and touch sensors using carbon nanomaterial): Raised $74 million.
• Kiosked (smart native advertising technology): Raised $64 million.
• ICEYE (developer of SAR microsatellite for earth observation applications): Raised $152 million.
• Varjo (provider of head-mounted display with resolution matching a human eye): Raised $100 million.

To learn more about Finland’s startup ecosystem, we spoke to these investors:

• Pirkka Palomaki, partner, Maki.vc
• Jyri Engestrom, founder, Yes VC
• Sakari Pihlava, partner, Vendep Capital
• Pontus Stråhlman, partner, Voima Ventures
• Timo Ahopelto, partner, Lifeline Ventures
• Petri Lehmuskoski, partner, Gorilla Capital

Pirkka Palomaki, partner, Maki.vc

What trends are you most excited about investing in, generally?
We are a generalist but are keen on deep tech and brand-driven companies both in B2C and B2B. We have been tracking closely new materials-based innovations, as well as breakthrough innovations in quantum computing. Breakthroughs happen also elsewhere and [we] have invested in B2B SaaS as well as one cloud-native massive multiplayer game company.

What’s your latest, most exciting investment?
One the latest investments is in a Swedish company called Carbon Cloud. They make it easy to discover your climate footprint and show it to the world — they can be found, for example, on the side of Oatly’s packaging. Carbon dioxide impact of consumer goods should be as visible as the nutrition values in food.

Are there startups that you wish you would see in the industry but don’t? What are some overlooked opportunities right now?
Femtech. There’s still quite little competition, but tremendous amount of work to do. Our team is keen to see more solutions on reproductive health, but also going beyond to solutions e.g., in syncing female’s personal cycle with optimal nutrition or training.

What are you looking for in your next investment, in general?
The team is always in the center and we are looking for entrepreneurs that are rewriting the future in global markets.

Which areas are either oversaturated or would be too hard to compete in at this point for a new startup? What other types of products/services are you wary or concerned about?
Free-to-play games is a tough and competitive market. There will likely be new winners, but also even greater number of companies that don’t make it compared to many other industries.

How much are you focused on investing in your local ecosystem versus other startup hubs (or everywhere) in general? More than 50%? Less?
We have a global mandate, but the Nordics is our home and where we have done most of our investments.

Which industries in your city and region seem well-positioned to thrive, or not, long term? What are companies you are excited about (your portfolio or not), which founders?
There are several, but the first on the top of mind is sustainability and new materials. Spinnova is a great example providing the textile industry with the most sustainable fibre in the world, produced with minimal harm to the environment, at a reasonable cost. With the stretch and strength qualities of cotton and the insulation of lamb’s wool, it can suit apparel, footwear, accessories, [and] home textiles to name a few applications. I’m also looking forward to seeing a great ecosystem and several startups being built around quantum computing. There are already a number of promising quantum technology companies, such as the Finnish IQM that builds world-class quantum computers and Bluefors that specialize in cryogen-free dilution refrigerator systems for quantum computing.

How should investors in other cities think about the overall investment climate and opportunities in your city?
There is strong supporting ecosystem in Finland for startups, strong engineering history and great culture of getting things done.

Do you expect to see a surge in more founders coming from geographies outside major cities in the years to come, with startup hubs losing people due to the pandemic and lingering concerns, plus the attraction of remote work?
The beauty of the startup ecosystem is that is built on innovation. We will most likely see more distributed organizations in the future, but I believe the major hubs will maintain their attractiveness in the future as well.

Which industry segments that you invest in look weaker or more exposed to potential shifts in consumer and business behavior because of COVID-19? What are the opportunities startups may be able to tap into during these unprecedented times?
Travel and hospitality has naturally taken a big hit. It will take time for the industry to fully recover and I would expect innovations in the domain in the future, whether it is in virtual travel or creating confidence in worry-free travel in the future.

How has COVID-19 impacted your investment strategy? What are the biggest worries of the founders in your portfolio? What is your advice to startups in your portfolio right now?
Extending the runway has been a general rule for many and making the company stronger and more competitive when things start picking up again.

Are you seeing “green shoots” regarding revenue growth, retention or other momentum in your portfolio as they adapt to the pandemic?
Customer support agents have been strained during the pandemic. Our portfolio company Ultimate.ai has been well-positioned to scale the customer support with their virtual agents while maintaining or even improving customer experience. I’ve been super happy to see them grow and expand rapidly.

What is a moment that has given you hope in the last month or so? This can be professional, personal or a mix of the two.

Samsung and three major contract manufacturing partners of Apple are among 16 firms to win $6.65 billion incentives under India’s federal plan to boost domestic smartphone production over the next five years. These companies had applied for the incentive program in August.

In a statement Tuesday evening, Indian Ministry of Electronics and Information Technology (MeitY) said these companies will be producing smartphones and other electronics components worth more than $143 billion over the next five years. In return, India will offer them an incentive of 4% to 6% on additional sales of goods produced locally over five years, with 2019-2020 set as the base year.

New Delhi’s move is aimed at significantly improving India’s manufacturing and exporting capacities and generating more local jobs. Around 60% of the locally produced products will be exported, the Indian ministry said. The companies will generate more than 200,000 direct employment opportunities in next five years and as many as 600,000 indirect employment opportunities during the same period, the ministry said.

The move is also a precursor to how the dynamics among major smartphone makers will change in India, the world’s second largest market, over the next five years. The inclusion of Foxconn, Wistron and Pegatron underscores how rapidly Apple plans to expand its local manufacturing capabilities in India. Wistron began assembling a handful of iPhone models in India three years ago, followed by Foxconn. Pegatron has yet to start producing in India.

“Apple and Samsung together account for nearly 60% of global sales revenue of mobile phones and this scheme is expected to increase their manufacturing base manifold in the country,” the ministry said.

“Industry has reposed its faith in India’s stellar progress as a world class manufacturing destination and this resonates strongly with Prime Minister’s clarion call of AtmaNirbhar Bharat – a self-reliant India,” the ministry added.

Indian firms Lava, Bhagwati (Micromax), Padget Electronics, UTL Neolyncs and Optiemus Electronics are also among the firms that have received the approval. But missing from the list are Chinese smartphone makers Oppo, Vivo, OnePlus and Realme that had not applied for the program. Chinese smartphone vendors currently command about 80% of the Indian market.

Greycroft, the New York and L.A.-based venture firm founded in 2006 by investors Alan Patricof, Dana Settle, and Ian Sigalow, has closed on two new funds totaling $678 million in capital commitments. One of those funds is its sixth flagship early-stage fund and it closed with $310 million dollars. The firm also collected $368 million in commitments for a third growth-stage fund that it will use to support breakout startups from its early-stage portfolio.

The venture fund invests between $500,000 and $10 million in a first check, and Greycroft will invest up to $15 million in a portfolio company over multiple rounds. Checks from its growth fund begin at $10 million and the firm says it will invest up to $50 million in any one company.

Greycroft now counts seven partners altogether across its two offices, including Settle and Sigalow.

Patricof, who early in his career founded the predecessor to Apax Partners, has since launched another new firm called Primetime Partners that announced a $32 million fund in summer that is investing in platforms and products for aging Americans.

The firm invests in both consumer and enterprise startups, with a heavier emphasis on consumer. Among the brands in its portfolio are Gwyneth Paltrow’s Goop, the consignment business The RealReal (which went public last year), and the dating site Bumble, which is reportedly gearing up for an IPO at an expected valuation of between $6 billion to $8 billion, as reported by Bloomberg.

The firm also recently co-led a $5.5 million Series A round for Sisu Cosmetics, a nearly two-year-old, Ireland-based chain of cosmetic clinics that’s expanding into the U.S.

Across its now ten investment vehicles, the firm has raised $2 billion altogether and has over 200 active investments.

Those investments are located in 23 states and 15 countries, including the Nigeria-based payment service Flutterwave, which closed on $35 million in Series B funding earlier this year, and Yeahka, a mobile payment and SMB lending provider in China that went public in June.

Greycroft’s most recent early-stage fund had closed with $250 million in 2018; its second growth-stage fund closed with $250 million in 2017.

The prospect of truly zero contact delivery seems closer — and more important — than ever with the pandemic changing how we think of last mile logistics. Autonomous delivery executives from FedEx, Postmates, and Refraction AI joined us to talk about the emerging field at TechCrunch Mobility 2020.

FedEx VP of Advanced Technology and Innovation Rebecca Yeung explained why the logistics giant felt that it was time to double down on its experiments in the area of autonomy.

“COVID brought the term ‘contactless’ — before that not many people are talking about contactless; Now it’s almost a preferred way of us delivering,” she said. “So we see, from government to consumers, open mindedness about, maybe in the future you would have everything delivered to you through autonomous means, and that’s the preferred way.”

“If you looked up Postmates robots on Twitter or Instagram, people are always kind of questioning, what is this? What is it doing? Everything changed overnight with COVID, where people would see the robot and immediately understand, oh, this is for contactless delivery,” said Postmates VP of special projects Ali Kashani. “Everything suddenly made sense.”

He also explained how the seeming constraints of a robotic platform specific to food delivery made the engineering process, if not easier, at least naturally bounded by the data they’d collected.

“It’s kind of one of the advantages of being so close to the market, we can use data from our platform to drive certain decisions, because you don’t want to over-engineer you also don’t want to under-engineer,” Kashani said. “We actually developed simulations that would put robots in any location in the country on some date in the past. It would tell us, how many deliveries did this robot do? How many hours was it outside? How many miles did it travel? And it would use that information to decide exactly what kind of battery life do we need? Does it need to carry drinks? How many drink holders should it have to cover 99% of deliveries?”

Matthew Johnson-Roberson, co-founder and CTO of Refraction AI, noted that the pandemic has raised interest and demand, but also highlighted where things need to move forward in different ways.

“Obviously no one wants a global pandemic, but it has certainly energized this industry and put more attention on it,” he said. “Everybody is excited, oh, we’re going to have contactless delivery, it’s going to be great. But I think there are some real challenges that need to be addressed as an industry to get there. One of them is social acceptance, the other’s regulation. That’s starting to change because of COVID. I’m hopeful that this is an inflection point, and that we really do see more serious investment in this, but also widespread deployment, so it’s not a tech demo that you get to see once in one place, but it actually begins to take over some sizable bit of the market.”

Yeung also emphasized the need for the infrastructure that supports these autonomous platforms: “Thinking about the future, commercial launch, you need the dynamic routing, you need the dispatch system, you need the user interface, you need a tracking interface. We see great synergy for us to leverage for all sorts of autonomous applications.”

In discussing the danger of replacing human workers with robots, Yeung and Kashani were sanguine, suggesting like others in the robotics industry that there would be a shift in labor but it won’t kill any jobs. Johnson-Roberson disagreed.

“I think we are going to be replacing jobs, and we need to face that head on,” he said. “I think it’s important that we reckon with that, that a lot of these decisions, they have a long history of not thinking through what hte human consequences will be. So I’m an advocate for saying, look, we’re replacing jobs. Let’s think as a society: How do we address that? How do we deal with it? I think that we could live in a future with more just, fairer jobs with health insurance, more benefits. But I don’t think it is going to look how it looks today.”

Nvidia is in the process of acquiring chip designer Arm for $40 billion. Coincidentally, both companies are also holding their respective developer conferences this week. After he finished his keynote at the Arm DevSummit, I sat down with Arm CEO Simon Segars to talk about the acquisition and what it means for the company.

Segars noted that the two companies started talking in earnest around May 2020, though at first, only a small group of executives was involved. Nvidia, he said, was really the first suitor to make a real play for the company — with the exception of SoftBank, of course, which took Arm private back in 2016 — and combining the two companies, he believes, simply makes a lot of sense at this point in time.

“They’ve had a meteoric rise. They’ve been building up to that,” Segars said. “So it just made a lot of sense with where they are at, where we are at and thinking about the future of AI and how it’s going to go everywhere and how that necessitates much more sophisticated hardware — and a much more sophisticated software environment on which developers can build products. The combination of the two makes a lot of sense in this moment.”

The data center market, where Nvidia, too, is already a major player, is also an area where Arm has heavily focused in recent years. And while it goes up against the likes of Intel, Segars is optimistic. “We’re not in it to be a bit player,” he said. “Our goal is to get a material market share and I think the proof to the pudding is there.”

He also expects that in a few years, we’ll see Arm-powered servers available on all of the major clouds. Right now, AWS is ahead in this game with its custom-built Gravitron processors. Microsoft and Google do not currently offer Arm-based servers.

“With each passing day, more and more of the software infrastructure that’s required for the cloud is getting ported over and optimized for Arm. So it becomes a more and more compelling proposition for sure,” he said, and cited both performance and energy efficiency as reasons for cloud providers to use Arm chips.

Another interesting aspect of the deal is that we may just see Arm sell some of Nvidia’s IP as well. That would be a big change — and a first — for Nvidia, but Segars believes it makes a lot of sense to do so.

“It may be that there is something in the portfolio of Nvidia that they currently sell as a chip that we may look at and go, ‘you know, what if we package that up as an IP product, without modifying it? There’s a market for that.’ Or it may be that there’s a thing in here where if we take that and combine it with something else that we were doing, we can make a better product or expand the market for the technology. I think it’s going to be more of the latter than it is the former because we design all our products to be delivered as IP.”

And while he acknowledged that Nvidia and Arm still face some regulatory hurdles, he believes the deal will be pro-competitive in the end — and that the regulators will see it the same way.

He does not believe, by the way, that the company will face any issues with Chinese companies not being able to license Arm’s designs because of export restrictions, something a lot of people were worried about when the deal was first announced.

“Export control of a product is all about where was it designed and who designed it,” he said. “And of course, just because your parent company changes, doesn’t change those fundamental properties of the underlying product. So we analyze all our products and look at how much U.S. content is in there, to what extent are our products subject to U.S. export control, U.K. export control, other export control regimes? It’s a full-time piece of work to make sure we stay on top of that.”

Here are some excerpts from our 30-minute conversation:

TechCrunch: Walk me through how that deal came about, actually, kind of what was the timeline for you?

Simon Segars: I think probably around May, June time was when it really kicked off. We started having some early discussions. And then, as these things progress, you suddenly kind of hit the ‘Okay, now let’s go.’ We signed a sort of first agreement to actually go into due diligence and then it really took off. It went from a few meetings, a bit of negotiation, to suddenly heads down and a broader set of people — but still a relatively small number of people involved, answering questions. We started doing due diligence documents, just the mountain of stuff that you go through and you end up with a document. [Segars shows a print-out of the contract, which is about the size of two phone books.]

You must have had suitors before this. What made you decide to go ahead with this deal this time around?

Well, to be honest, in Arm’s history, there’s been a lot of rumors about people wanting to acquire Arm, but really until SoftBank in 2016, nobody ever got serious. I can’t think of a case where somebody actually said, ‘come on, we want to try and negotiate a deal here.’ And so it’s been four years under SoftBank’s ownership and that’s been really good because we’ve been able to do what we said we were going to do around investing much more aggressively in the technology. We’ve had a relationship with Nvidia for a long time. [Rene Haas, Arm’s president of its Intellectual Property Group, who previously worked at Nvidia] has had a relationship with [Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang] for a long time. They’ve had a meteoric rise. They’ve been building up to that. So it just made a lot of sense with where they are at, where we are at and thinking about the future of AI and how it’s going to go everywhere and how that necessitates much more sophisticated hardware — and a much more sophisticated software environment on which developers can build products. The combination of the two makes a lot of sense in this moment.

How does it change the trajectory you were on before for Arm?