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A young Indian startup that is taking on the country’s antiquated insurance industry with a digital-first product — and which has already received backing from global giant Amazon — today announced a new financing round.

Bangalore-based Acko said on Tuesday it has raised $60 million in its Series D financing round. Germany-based Munich Re, one of the world’s largest reinsurers, led the financing round, while existing investors Amazon, RPS Ventures and Intact Ventures, corporate venture arm of Canada’s largest property and casualty insurer, participated in it.

The new round, which brings Acko’s to-date raise to $200 million, valued the three-year-old startup at about $500 million (up from about $300 million last year), a person familiar with the matter told TechCrunch.

Acko develops and sells bite-sized auto insurance products (aimed at drivers and others in transportation-related scenarios). The startup expanded its catalog six months ago to provide healthcare protections that it sells to businesses and employers. More than 150,000 employees are already covered by Acko’s healthcare protection, the startup said.

Acko founder and chief executive Varun Dua told TechCrunch in an interview that the startup has amassed over 60 million customers and has issued over 650 million policies to date.

Offering a large catalog of bite-sized insurance policies is crucial for firms in India. Only a fraction of the nation’s 1.3 billion people currently have access to insurance and most can’t afford sizeable policies.

According to rating agency ICRA, insurance products had reached less than 3% of the population as of 2017. An average Indian makes about $2,100 a year, according to the World Bank. ICRA estimated that of those Indians who had purchased an insurance product, they were spending less than $50 on it in 2017.

“We’re excited to join forces with one of the leading digital insurers in India, as well as other investment partners, to help support Varun and his impressive team as they continue their journey,” said Oshri Kaplan, Director at Munich Re Ventures, in a statement.

“As Munich Re Ventures’ first investment in India, we look forward to the positive impact that digitally native insurance solutions will have on the country with Acko leading the way.”

Acko sells insurance policies directly to customers or through partners such as Amazon, which entered the insurance space in the country earlier this year in collaboration with Acko. (Amazon currently accounts for only a fraction of the insurance Acko sells, people familiar with the matter said.)

Acko’s products have quickly gained popularity in India for three reasons. It does not rely on middlemen, who have proven to slow down innovation for the insurance industry at large, Dua explained. Having direct engagement with a customer allows Acko to offer more competitive and personalized policies, he said.

The second is Acko’s underwriting technology, for which it comb through a range of data points to assess whether someone is eligible for a policy, he said.

Acko has also made it easier for people to access policies and then claim them. As everything is digital, sign-up does not require any paperwork and making a claim is quick, too — factors that keep existing customers happy, Dua said.

Scores of startups and established banks in India have launched products to win this market. Paytm (India’s most valuable startup) and its co-founder and chief executive, Vijay Shekhar Sharma, announced in July they were acquiring insurance firm Raheja QBE for a sum of $76 million.

Dua, who has spent more than a decade in the insurance business, said he was not worried about the competition as the market is large enough.

The startup plans to use the fresh capital to scale its technology and data teams by at least 30 to 40%, Dua said. It also plans to use portion of the capital to invest in branding to reach more customers, especially those living in smaller cities and towns in India.

And rest of the money will be used to finance the insurance policies. Unlike several fintech startups in India that work with banking partners to finance loans, current regulatory rules require insurance firms to underwrite risks themselves.

“We would love to be in a position where we always have a strong balance sheet,” Dua said.

Usually, Apple making a grand entrance to an entrenched market would spell doom for the players there, but when it comes to Apple’s latest digital workout service, it doesn’t look like investors are worried about Fitness+ killing the momentum.

Part of that may be that, expectations were already priced-in to these stocks. The fitness play had been rumored by a report in Bloomberg last month, but few details were public of the service which was announced today and appears to echo offerings from Peloton and Fitbit, but fully leverage Apple’s Watch hardware.

Peloton was already having a great day, currently up more than 5%, though it took a brief hit during Apple’s Fitness+ presentation before rebounding. The stock is currently up a staggering 191% in 2020.

Fitbit’s share price was relatively unchanged in intra-day trading. The company launched a Fitbit Premium service last month, but its stock is flat from the beginning of the year.

Things didn’t look much different for the more entrenched fitness companies. Weight Watchers International, which has seen its share price nearly halved since the beginning of the year, was down less than 1% by time of publication and Planet Fitness, which has had a rough year but is showing signs of recovery, was up nearly 5% at the time of writing.

Why so little movement across the board? Well, Apple is pressing forward on entering a number of digital markets in its services business at the moment, and that spread can mean less focus on dominating an industry. With its Apple One subscription bundling fitness on the higher-end tier, there’s always the danger that consumers won’t leave another subscription to join Apple, but already belonging to the Apple One will prevent them from looking at rival fitness services.

Underestimating Apple is never a wise proposition, but the company is an unprecedented position as it looks to kickstart several digital services and, out-of-the-gate at least, they haven’t all been slam dunks.

Latent AI, a startup that was spun out of SRI International, makes it easier to run AI workloads at the edge by dynamically managing workloads as necessary.

Using its proprietary compression and compilation process, Latent AI promises to compress library files by 10x and run them with 5x lower latency than other systems, all while using less power thanks to its new adaptive AI technology, which the company is launching as part of its appearance in the TechCrunch Disrupt Battlefield competition today.

Founded by CEO Jags Kandasamy and CTO Sek Chai, the company has already raised a $6.5 million seed round led by Steve Jurvetson of Future Ventures and followed by Autotech Ventures .

Before starting Latent AI, Kandasamy sold his previous startup OtoSense to Analog Devices (in addition to managing HPE Mid-Market Security business before that). OtoSense used data from sound and vibration sensors for predictive maintenance use cases. Before its sale, the company worked with the likes of Delta Airlines and Airbus.

Image Credits: Latent AI

In some ways, Latent AI picks up some of this work and marries it with IP from SRI International .

“With OtoSense, I had already done some edge work,” Kandasamy said. “We had moved the audio recognition part out of the cloud. We did the learning in the cloud, but the recognition was done in the edge device and we had to convert quickly and get it down. Our bill in the first few months made us move that way. You couldn’t be streaming data over LTE or 3G for too long.”

At SRI, Chai worked on a project that looked at how to best manage power for flying objects where, if you have a single source of power, the system could intelligently allocate resources for either powering the flight or running the onboard compute workloads, mostly for surveillance, and then switch between them as needed. Most of the time, in a surveillance use case, nothing happens. And while that’s the case, you don’t need to compute every frame you see.

“We took that and we made it into a tool and a platform so that you can apply it to all sorts of use cases, from voice to vision to segmentation to time series stuff,” Kandasamy explained.

What’s important to note here is that the company offers the various components of what it calls the Latent AI Efficient Inference Platform (LEIP) as standalone modules or as a fully integrated system. The compressor and compiler are the first two of these and what the company is launching today is LEIP Adapt, the part of the system that manages the dynamic AI workloads Kandasamy described above.

Image Credits: Latent AI

In practical terms, the use case for LEIP Adapt is that your battery-powered smart doorbell, for example, can run in a low-powered mode for a long time, waiting for something to happen. Then, when somebody arrives at your door, the camera wakes up to run a larger model — maybe even on the doorbell’s base station that is plugged into power — to do image recognition. And if a whole group of people arrives at ones (which isn’t likely right now, but maybe next year, after the pandemic is under control), the system can offload the workload to the cloud as needed.

Kandasamy tells me that the interest in the technology has been “tremendous.” Given his previous experience and the network of SRI International, it’s maybe no surprise that Latent AI is getting a lot of interest from the automotive industry, but Kandasamy also noted that the company is working with consumer companies, including a camera and a hearing aid maker.

The company is also working with a major telco company that is looking at Latent AI as part of its AI orchestration platform and a large CDN provider to help them run AI workloads on a JavaScript backend.

No iPhone 12 announced today, but Apple unveiled a new chip that will power the next generation of its hardware (including that phone whenever it’s launched). The A14 Bionic, which will ship first with the new iPad Air, is going to be Apple’s fastest yet.

Apple says that it will be the first to use five nanometer process technology, incredibly small-scale but powerful, with 11.8 billion transistors packed into the chip, up 40% on its previous generation seven nanometer chips. This will work out to 11 trillion operations per second.

This translates into a more efficient chip: more power with less battery consumption, with more processes run in parallel across a six-core design.  Apple claims this will make the chip up to two times faster than the most popular Windows laptop, three times faster than the fastest Android tablet and six times faster than the fastest Chromebook.

This makes the iPad Air something that it will market the cheaper device not just at younger users but gamers and others that will heavily use their devices. Photo editing will be faster, and so will any analytical applications, with the chip also featuring a 16-core neural engine.

Chips are at the heart of how the consumer electronics industry compares, and the next generation of how that will play out will be very interesting indeed, with Nvidia this weekend announcing its intent to acquire ARM — an Apple partner — for $40 billion. ARM has positioned itself as a “Switzerland” in the industry, providing its designs to everyone on equal footing, but it has been increasingly taking on a more autonomous role in its chip design over the years, and this A14 is the latest product of that strategy.

More to come.

Apple is launching a fitness subscription service called Fitness+, which for $80 a year will give users access to workouts and instruction delivered through the Apple Watch or iPad.

Fitness+ will cost $9.99 a month or $79.99 a year. Apple is offering the first three months free with the purchase of a watch. Family will also be able to use Fitness+ for no additional charge.

The launch of Fitness+ builds on the growing number of health metrics already available on the Apple Watch, including heart rate, calories burned, pace and distance. This new service folds in a catalog of the video workouts that can be viewed on a user’s iPhone, iPad or Apple TV. Once a user launches a video, it communicates with and starts the correct workout in their Apple Watch workout app.

The user’s health metrics are sent in real time to whatever screen they’re using to watch the workout video. Those metrics change as the workout progresses. For instance, if a trainer in a particular video tells the user to check their heart rate, those numbers get larger and make it easier to see.

Apple’s in-house trainers will offer fresh workouts each week from its Fitness+ studio. There are also videos geared for yoga, cycling, treadmill walking and running as well strength and core exercises. The aim is for these workouts to be done anywhere and with any equipment.

After the workout, users will get a summary of the data captured from a user’s Apple watch sensors.  Apple Music subscribers can also save music played during their workouts and then listen to them later.

Apple said Tuesday that all of this data will be protected. When using Fitness+, calories and the workouts will not be stored along with their Apple ID.

The Fitness+ service is the latest example of Apple building out an ecosystem of subscription products. Its creation also adds to the increasingly crowded field. Fitbit is just one company that has its own service that’s tied to its hardware. Then there are the host of fitness apps. For instance, Aaptiv, a Netflix-style app-based startup that connects people to a range of trainer-led indoor and outdoor fitness and wellness sessions, raised fresh capital back in April.

At Apple’s (virtual) hardware event today, the company announced a significantly redesigned iPad Air with a new look and tiny bezels. In a move portentous for other Apple products, Touch ID has returned — inside the power button on the top of the tablet.

For the 10th anniversary of the iPad, the new 4th-generation Air is the biggest change to the device in a while. “This is a big year for iPad,” said CEO Tim Cook, before introducing changes to the non-Pro tablets in the lineup. “And today, we’re thrilled to introduce an all new completely redesigned iPad Air.”

The biggest change has to be the next-generation touch ID sensor built into the power button. Time will tell whether this is truly more convenient than having it in the “home” button, but it’s clear now that Apple has seen that demand for the fingerprint-based unlocking method has not abated.

Image Credits: Apple

Could the new Touch ID power button show up on the iPhone 12, or at the very least on the iPad Pro later? It seems likely, as while Face ID has become more reliable over time, sometimes people just prefer the hands-on approach.

The look is new to the iPad Air series, but mainly just resembles the Pro, with flat sides, rounded corners on the screen, and a prominent camera bump. There are also a bunch of hot new colors.

Image Credits: Apple

There’s a new display, with a 2360×1640 resolution, a little higher than the last generation. You probably won’t notice the difference unless they’re side by side, but Apple has always pushed to make sure its devices have among the highest quality screens out there, and the new Air is no exception.

The connector has graduated from Lightning to USB-C like its big brother the iPad Pro, so while on one hand you might need to throw away your cables… again… the new cables aren’t special Apple ones sprinkled with fairy dust, so you’ll be able to use $5 ones from Monoprice instead.

There’s an improved front camera, and the back one gets the iPad Pro’s 12-megapixel, 4K-capable shooter. But no lidar, unfortunately. Speakers also get a boost, with stereo audio in landscape mode.

You’ll be able to pick up the new iPad Air starting next month at $599 for the cheapest version (wi-fi only, with the least amount of storage, exact amount TBD).

The vanilla iPad, now in its 8th generation, also got a computing power bump to the A12 series of chips, but no big design changes. With 500 million iPad devices sold, the traditional design is proven to be just fine. It’ll set you back $329.

Africa may be a diverse continent overflowing with different cultures, languages and customs, but Tuverl co-founder and CEO Hope Ndhlovu says there is one experience — or industry — that is consistent from South Africa up to Egypt and everywhere in between. Public transportation is the same fragmented, disorganized ecosystem of millions of small-to-medium private enterprises throughout Africa.

These public transport operators can be as small as a one-person outfit with a single van or bus up to a larger enterprise of several vehicles. There are no schedules or any coordination, and minibus operators will often wait until they can fill their vehicle with passengers. Meanwhile, the industry only accepts cash and without a means to monitor the number of trips and passengers, fraud and simple poor accounting is rampant.

The upshot: public transportation is unreliable for commuters and unprofitable for the public transport operators. In this chaos, Ndhlovu and co-founder Bahlakoana Mabetha see opportunity.

Their Zimbabwe-based startup Tuverl, which debuted Tuesday at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, is an app aimed at streamlining public transportation. Public operators pay Tuverl a fee to join. From here, operators can use the app to manage their fleets and locate vehicles as well as process fares. Commuters, meanwhile, can use the app to track intra-city buses and minibuses in real time, book trips, hail taxis on-demand and pay for their public transportation. Passengers can also rate and review their trips.

The app was released as a beta version in the Google Play Store in February and has 30 public transport operators and 253 commuters. Tuverl plans to expand as COVID-19 lockdown measures ease.

For now, Ndhlovi and Mabetha are focused on Zimbabwe. But the Harvard University grads have a grander vision for Tuverl.

“My motivation really was to try to improve public transportation for the ordinary person because it really makes a different in their lives,” Ndhlovi told me in a recent interview, adding that as a young student he was typically late for school because of inefficient public transport. “We need to build up operations in Zimbabwe and get some traction there. But we essentially want to make this an African thing. We want to be in every African country.”

Apple said its latest iOS 14 software will be released on September 16, ahead of the company’s release of the next-generation iPhones.

We saw our first glimpse at iOS 14 earlier this year at Apple’s Worldwide Developer Conference, which included home screen widgets and reply threading in Messages. It also comes with new Maps features, including adding cycling as a transportation option, and routing for electric vehicle owners so they can find charging points along the way.

iOS 14 also comes with an in-built translator, an improved and redesigned Siri, and better security and privacy features in the Safari browser.

But one privacy feature promised by Apple will be delayed. Apple said it would allow iPhone users to opt-out of in-app tracking, which the company said would not be immediately enforced when iOS 14 is released. It follows an uproar from ad giants — including Facebook — which lobbied against the proposal. Apple said it would give developers until next year to adjust to the changes.

iOS 14 will be supported on iPhone 6s and later, and lands as a free download.

Apple today announced a new feature that will allow families to stay better connected, even if some members of the family don’t have an iPhone. The company introduced a new feature called Family Setup that allows a parent to pair their iPhone with a child’s Apple Watch in order to stay in touch, receive location notifications, use parental controls, and more.

With Family Setup, parents can set controls, like which contacts the child can communicate with over messages. It also allows family members to receive location alerts so parents will know where the child is and if they have entered or exited a geofenced area. For a child, this could be the school or a basketball practice.

To some extent, that makes Family Setup a competitor to mobile family tracking apps, like Life360, which have become popular tools for families who keep track of one another’s location. Or, as some would argue, apps for the helicopter parenting era of over-monitoring and surveillance.

But Apple’s advantage in this market is that it positions itself as a privacy-focused company. That means parents may feel like they can trust Apple to not collect their family’s location data or sell it to third-parties.

In addition to location tracking, Family Setup lets parents also configure downtime settings, to limit interactions and notifications on the paired watch while the child is focused on schoolwork with the new “Schooltime” mode. Workout integration is available, as well, and offers an Activity Rings experience designed just for kids.

Meanwhile, children can create their own Memoji with just their Apple Watch that they can use and send in stickers and messages, or use in the new Memoji Watch Face. They can also use their Watch to reach emergency services, if needed, through the built-in Emergency SOS feature.

Though the feature set is clearly designed for parents with children too young for their own phone, it’s unclear how well it will be embraced by parents, due to the Apple Watch’s higher price point. That’s something Apple attempted to address with the iPhone SE. However, the SE starts at $279 — not as affordable as giving a child a cheap Android device while they head out to run around the neighborhood with friends.

In addition, the new feature may make sense for parents who already have older Apple Watches that they can hand down to kids as they upgrade.

Apple also noted Family Setup may make sense for “older adults” — meaning aging relatives who, due to medical conditions perhaps, may need a bit more active monitoring.

The feature requires requires a cellular model of Apple Watch Series 4 and later and will be available at launch with select carrier partners, including AT&T, T-Mobile and (TechCrunch parent’s parent) Verizon.

Online service SoloSuit wants to help Americans who are being sued for a debt fight back using automated tools. The company, which is launching its service nationwide today at TechCrunch Disrupt Startup Battlefield, guides users through preparing a response to their lawsuit, optionally having a consumer protection attorney look over the entire document on their behalf, then handing the printing and court filing.

The idea for SoloSuit came from founder, George Simons, who had bought a car during his first year of law school and struggled to find an attorney who would help him out. That prompted the realization that there are likely millions of people across the U.S. who also can’t find attorneys to take cases for a variety of reasons. For example, they may struggle if there isn’t enough money in the case to make it worth an attorney’s while, or if the attorney they want is too busy to get on the phone, he suggests.

The area of focus SoloSuit landed on, however, was debt lawsuits. Every year, 10 million Americans get sued for debt and 9 million automatically lose because they aren’t able to figure out how to respond to those lawsuits, Simons claims. These debts could include medical debt, credit cards, auto loans, student loans, or any other unsecured debts. After a debt collector is unable to collect from the consumer, they may choose to sue for that debt instead.

With the SoloSuit web app, users can respond to these lawsuits in about 15 minutes, the startup says.

The way the process works is that when someone receives a complaint and summons in the mail, they’ll usually only have 14-30 days to respond, depending on the state, before they automatically lose their case. Often, customers will Google for information about what to do next, which is where they’ll find SoloSuit’s free online guides. These will also refer the potential customers to the web service. Here, the web app, which was demoed at Disrupt, will guide the customer through creating the response to the lawsuit and optionally pay to have an attorney review it.

Customers can either pay $15 to have the response printed and filed on their behalf, or $115 to have an attorney review it before filing.

The startup spun out of the Brigham Young University LawX legal design lab, where it was originally founded by a team of students. Simons ended up taking the reins and the other students have moved on. Currently, he is the sole founder but is expecting to hire a technical co-founder soon.

Since SoloSuit’s founding a couple of years ago, it has seen 3,000 Utah-based customers who have been sued for a combined total of $11 million in debt lawsuits. The startup believes they’ve helped around 50% of those cases get dismissed.

Today, the service will launch across all 50 U.S. states and will add the attorney review feature.