Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Microsoft has confirmed via its official Xbox Twitter account that a discless, tiny Xbox called the Series S will be released alongside its forthcoming Xbox Series X. The Series S was initially leaked late Monday, first by Brad Sams on Twitter, and also by Walking Cat. The Xbox account tweeted an image fo the same small design dominated by a large, round vent grill, and said that the estimated retail price at launch for the new version of the console will be $299.

The original leak from Sams also includes the $299 price, and Walking Cat’s leaked trailer video inlaid more details – including noting that the console is 60% smaller than the forthcoming Series X, but that it includes a high-speed 512GB  NVMe SSD, with performance offering up to 1440p resolution at 120FPS, along with 4K upscaling. It’ll also support DirectX ray tracing.

https://twitter.com/h0x0d/status/1303252607759130624

There have been rumors about the Series S landing along with the Series X, which Microsoft made official first all the way back in December 2019 (what even was 2019, was it real?). While Microsoft didn’t confirm any of the leaked specs or performance from the trailer, that definitely looks like an official Xbox teaser Walking Cat came across, so I wouldn’t anticipate any surprises there.

Microsoft also didn’t share anything about Series S availability or pre-orders. The launches of both the next-gen Xbox and the PS5 from Sony have been extremely drawn out across massive drip campaigns, and pre-order and availability specifics are still being held close to the chest, much to the frustration of gaming fans. Hopefully this leak and subsequent confirmation means we’re getting close.

Diffblue, a spin-out from Oxford University, uses machine learning to help developers automatically create unit tests for their Java code. Since few developers enjoy writing unit tests to ensure that their code works as expected, increased automation doesn’t just help developers focus on writing the code that actually makes a difference but also lead to code with fewer bugs. Current Diffblue customers include the likes of Goldman Sachs and AWS.

So far, Diffblue only offered its service through a paid — and pricey — subscription. Today, however, the company also launched its free community edition, Diffblue Cover: Community Edition, which doesn’t feature all of the enterprise features in its paid versions, but still offers an IntelliJ plugin and the same AI-generated unit tests as the paid editions.

The company also plans to launch a new lower cost ‘individual’ plan for Diffblue Cover soon, starting at $120 per month. This plan will offer access to support and other advanced features as well.

At its core, Diffblue uses unsupervised learning to build these unit tests. “What we’re doing is unique in the sense that there have been tools before that use what’s called static analysis,” Diffblue CEO Mathew Loge, who joined the company about a year ago, explained. “They look at the program and they basically understand the path through the program and try and work backwards from the path. So if the path gets to this point, what inputs do we need to put into the program in order to get here?” That approach has its limitations, though, which Diffblue’s reinforcement learning method aims to get around.

Once the process has run its course, Diffblue provides developers with readable tests. That’s important, Loge stressed, because if a test fails and a developer can’t figure out what happened, it’s virtually impossible for the developer to fix the issue. That’s something the team learning the hard way, as early version so Diffblue used a very aggressive algorithm that provided great test coverage (the key metric for unit tests), but made it very hard for developers to figure out what was happening.

With the community edition, which doesn’t offer the command-line interface (CLI) of Diffblue’s paid editions, developers can write their code in IntelliJ as before and then simply click a button to have Diffblue write the tests for that code.

“The Community Edition is designed to be very accessible. It is literally one click in the IDE and you get your tests. The CLI version is more sophisticated and it covers more cases and solves for teams and large deployments inside of an organization,” Loge explained.

The company plans to add support for other languages, including Python, JavaScript and C# over time, but as Loge noted, Java has long been a mainstay in the business world and the team felt like that would be the best language to start with. As Loge noted, though, the technology

Diffblue has actually been around for a bit. The company raised a $22 million Series A round led by Goldman Sachs and with participation from Oxford Sciences Innovation and the Oxford Technology and Innovations Fund in 2017. You obviously don’t raise that kind of money to focus only on unit tests for Java code. Besides support for more language, unit tests are just the first step in the company’s overall goal of automating more of the programming process with the help of AI.

“We started with testing because it’s an important and urgent problem, especially with the impact that it has on DevOps and the adoption of more rapid software cycles,” Loge said. The next obvious step is to then take a similar approach to automatically fixing bugs — and especially security bugs — in code as well.

“The idea is that there are these steppingstones to machines writing more and more code,” he said. “And also, frankly, it’s a way of getting developers used to that. Because developer acceptance is a crucial part of making this successful.”

TikTok, the popular short video sharing app, has joined the European Union’s Code of Conduct on Countering Illegal Hate Speech.

In a statement on joining the code, TikTok’s head of trust and safety for EMEA, Cormac Keenan, said: “We have never allowed hate on TikTok, and we believe it’s important that internet platforms are held to account on an issue as crucial as this.”

The non-legally binding code kicked off four years ago with a handful of tech giants agreeing to measures aimed at accelerating takedowns of illegal content while supporting their users to report hate speech and committing to increase joint working to share best practice to tackle the problem.

Since 2016 the code has grown from single to double figure signatories — and now covers Dailymotion, Facebook, Google+, Instagram, Jeuxvideo.com, Microsoft, Snapchat, TikTok, Twitter and YouTube.

TikTok’s statement goes on to highlight the platform’s “zero-tolerance” stance on hate speech and hate groups — in what reads like a tacit dig at Facebook, given the latter’s record of refusing to take down hate speech on ‘freedom of expression‘ grounds (including founder Mark Zuckerberg’s personal defence of letting holocaust denial thrive on his platform).

“We have a zero-tolerance stance on organised hate groups and those associated with them, like accounts that spread or are linked to white supremacy or nationalism, male supremacy, anti-Semitism, and other hate-based ideologies. We also remove race-based harassment and the denial of violent tragedies, such as the Holocaust and slavery,” Keenan writes.

“Our ultimate goal is to eliminate hate on TikTok. We recognise that this may seem an insurmountable challenge as the world is increasingly polarised, but we believe that this shouldn’t stop us from trying. Every bit of progress we make gets us that much closer to a more welcoming community experience for people on TikTok and out in the world.”

It’s interesting that EU hate speech rules are being viewed as a PR opportunity for TikTok to differentiate itself vs rival social platforms — even as most of them (Facebook included) are signed up to the very same code.

TikTok signing up comes a few months after it added its name to a similar EU initiative aimed at tackling the spread of online disinformation via a series of non-legally binding commitments.

The voluntary codes have proved popular with tech giants, given they lack legal compulsion and provide the opportunity for platforms to project the idea they’re doing something about tricky content issues — without the calibre and efficacy of their action being quantifiable.

The codes have also bought time by staving off actual regulation. But that is now looming. EU lawmakers are, for example, eyeing binding transparency rules for platforms to back up voluntary reports of illegal hate speech removals and make sure users are being properly informed of platform actions.

Commissioners are also consulting on and drafting a broader package of measures with the aim of updating long-standing rules wrapping digital services — including looking specifically at the rules around online liability and defining platform responsibilities vis-a-vis content.

A proposal for the Digital Services Act is slated before the end of the year.

The exact shape of the next-gen EU platform regulation remains to be seen but tighter rules for platform giants is one very real possibility, as lawmakers consult on ex ante regulation of so-called ‘gatekeeper’ platforms.

“Europe’s online marketplaces should be vibrant ecosystems, where start-ups have a real chance to blossom – they shouldn’t be closed shops controlled by a handful of gatekeeper platforms,” said EVP and competition chief, Margarthe Vestager, giving a speech in Berlin yesterday. “A list of ‘dos and don’ts’ could prevent conduct that is proven to be harmful to happen in the first place.

“The goal is that all companies, big and small, can compete on their merits on and offline.”

In just one example of the ongoing content moderation challenges faced by platforms, clips of a suicide were reported to be circulating on TikTok this week. Yesterday the company said it was trying to remove the content which it said had been livestreamed on Facebook.

Thunes, a Singapore-based startup developing a cross-border payments network to make financial services more accessible in emerging markets, announced today it has raised a $60 million Series B. The round was led by Africa-focused firm Helios Investment Partners, with participation from Checkout.com, and returning investors GGV Capital and Future Shape.

Thunes launched in 2019 when financial tech company TransferTo split into two companies: Thunes for business-to-business solutions, and DT One, which focuses on consumer services like mobile top-ups and data bundles.

Thunes develops APIs and other technology for financial companies, including banks, digital wallet providers, and money transfer services, that helps them reach customers in emerging economies, who often don’t have access to traditional bank accounts. Instead, many rely on digital wallets or mobile money accounts to make or receive online payments.

The company now operates in about 100 countries, up from 40 when TechCrunch covered its $10 million Series A in May 2019. The latest round will be used to grow its operations across Africa, Asia and Latin America, and brings Thunes’ total raised so far to $70 million.

Headquartered in Singapore, Thunes also has offices in London, Shanghai, New York, Dubai and Nairobi. Chief executive officer Peter De Caluwe told TechCrunch that Thunes looked for active investors who could help it work with banks and regulators in new markets, and help them connect with potential clients. Part of its Series B round will be used to hire teams in countries it wants to enter or expand its operations in, including Kenya, Tanzania, Zimbabwe, and Ethiopia.

“Having Helios, who know many of the regulators and players already in Africa, will allow us to grow faster and get introductions,” said De Caluwe. “GGV did the same for us in China, because GGV is well-established in China and the [San Francisco] Bay Area.”

In an email to TechCrunch, Helios Investment Partners co-founder and managing partner Tope Lawani said the firm focuses on fintech, especially payments, in Africa, and backed Thunes because it is building important financial infrastructure.

Its other investments include online payment platform Fawry, which recently went public on the Egyptian Stock Exchange.

“Cross-border payments represents a significant market opportunity globally given increasing cross border trade and globalization; yet, across several emerging markets, fragmented and complex payment ecosystems often leave businesses and consumers struggling with slow, costly and unreliable ways of moving money,” Lawani said. “Thunes’ unique platform which was set up to address these pain points by providing accessible, fast and reliable payment solutions stood out to us as a company very well positioned to capture this growth”

Pulling together a fragmented ecosystem

Similarly to how the SWIFT system connects traditional banks, Thunes’ cross-border payments network makes it easier to transfer money online to recipients in different countries, even if they use different financial services, by serving as a hub for financial institutions, digital wallets and other payment systems.

De Caluwe said Thunes divides its markets’ needs into four categories. The first are countries that are primarily cash-driven, like the Philippines. The second are places where there is a dominant digital wallet, like MPesa in Kenya (one of Thunes’ clients). Then there are countries like Indonesia, where there are a host of new financial instruments, like GrabPay or GoPay. Finally, Thunes also serves banks that usually work with businesses.

“Nobody really connects all these players together. It might sound very logical to do that, but it’s almost like building an infrastructure, making sure there are pipes, tunnels, or whatever you want to call it, going between a wallet in Africa, a bank in China or accounting in Southeast Asia,” said De Caluwe.

SWIFT (or the Society for Worldwide Interbank Financial Telecommunication), founded in 1973, revolutionized the financial industry by connecting banks through a standardized messaging system. This is what enables people to deposit checks from another bank into their accounts.

Thunes wants to do the same thing with digital financial services in emerging markets. “All of these e-wallets, bank accounts, mobile money accounts, we plug them into our central platform, so they become interoperable, which means that you can easily transfer money from one country to another country over our network,” De Caluwe said.

Thunes’ market opportunity is massive: based on data from a strategic workshop it conducted with financial research firm EY, about $45 trillion flows between the countries Thunes operates in. That amount includes many different kinds of transactions, but Thunes is taking a focused approach to which ones it handles, with APIs designed for specific use cases.

The first example De Caluwe gave is for remittance companies, including MoneyGram, Western Union and Remitly (all Thunes clients), to move money into digital wallets and bank accounts. Another API was developed for processing large amounts of payments and is used by clients like VIA, a region-wide mobile wallet alliance launched by Singtel Group, the Singapore-based telecommunications conglomerate. Thunes’ technology allows people to make payments from their VIA wallets in different currencies and countries. A major part of Thunes’ business is also its B2B solutions, designed for cross-border trade, that allows companies in different countries to transfer money directly into each other’s bank accounts without needing to deal with a maze of interbank connections and long wait times.

How Thunes’ technology helps

Part of Thunes’ Series B is earmarked for product development, specifically technology that will enable more collections from countries. De Caluwe explained that so far, most of Thunes’ solutions have focused on moving money into its markets. A potential use case for collections are Chinese retailers who sell to customers in African countries. Thunes’ new solution will allow them to collect payments directly from a digital wallet like MPesa, while making it easier for people to make payments on sites that don’t accept digital wallets or mobile money accounts. To serve those customers, Thunes is also working on digital bank accounts, which it has already begun piloting in Indonesia. Users are able to deposit cash into their digital bank accounts at ATMs, and then use those funds for online payments.

Other noteworthy Thunes clients include Grab, which uses its real-time payment system to make daily transfers to drivers’ digital wallets, bank accounts or cash pick-up locations, and the National Bank of Dubai.

Traditional methods of sending money across international borders are time-consuming and expensive, and there many financial tech companies looking to solve some of those pain points. Some of the best-known are Transferwise, Revolut and Payoneer.

Thunes differentiates by focusing almost exclusively on emerging markets, where the barriers to entry are high. Transferwise theoretically is a competitor, but it doesn’t serve as many markets as Thunes, and is also a potential client for Thunes’ technology, De Caluwe said.

Thunes does compete with regional digital payment hubs, but De Caluwe said the market opportunity is so vast he’d be “happy to share that $45 trillion with many players, because even if we could get one or two percent of that, we would already be a very larger business.” He added, “the market is so large and the systems that are currently used are broken or not helpful because many consumers can’t even get access to it since they don’t have a bank accounts, they only have a digital wallet or mobile money account.”

One advantage of Thunes’ technology is that it significantly reduces the amount of transaction fees consumers or businesses need to pay. The company makes revenue by charging a fixed transaction fee between two cents to $2, depending on the destination country. If there is a currency exchange involved, it charges a small markup on the exchange rate, using mid-market rates for reference.

“We need to make money, but our price also needs to be very attractive for a bank, a financial institution, digital wallet or mobile money accounts, so they can also make a markup on what they’re selling to the customer,” De Caluwe said. “So we operate on small margins, high volumes and high frequency.”

Skin Analytics, a U.K.-based startup that has developed a skin cancer screening service that uses artificial intelligence, has raised £4 million in Series A funding. The round was led by Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Nesta and Mustard Seed Ventures.

Skin Analytics says it will use the injection of cash to expand its focus to the U.S. after it was awarded the “Breakthrough Device Designation” by the FDA, as part of a programme designed to fast track new technologies that can have significant impact on the nation’s health.

It will also continue forging partnerships within the U.K.’s national health service, following the launch of what it claims was the world’s first “AI-powered” clinical pathway in conjunction with University Hospital Birmingham.

Skin Analytics offers a CE marked medical device that is studies suggests is able to identify skin cancers, pre-cancerous and benign lesions “to the same level as a dermatologist”. The idea is to enable health systems and insurers to increase dermatology capacity by reducing the burden of diagnosis for dermatologists.

“At its most simple, skin cancer is the world’s most common cancer and incidence is increasing around the world,” says Skin Analytics founder Neil Daly. “Overlay that with the fact there is a global shortage of dermatologists and we have a real challenge already with how we identify and deal with skin cancer”.

Daly says that Skin Analytics has developed a clinically validated AI system that can identify not only the important skin cancers, but the pre-cancerous lesions which can be treated by GPs and a range of benign lesions. “We can do that using a low cost attachment and a smartphone, allowing us to put this into innovative patient pathways either at GP practices or in hospitals,” he says.

“By using our service, we can reduce the number of patients who end up in hospital by 40-60%, depending on where our technology is used. That [means]… we can reduce the demand on our scarce dermatology resources, freeing them up to focus on other patients such as the inflammatory skin disease patients who often wait months for appointments. We can also reduce the cost of skin cancer, freeing up that money to be reassigned to improving care elsewhere”.

Because skin cancer is such a large problem, coupled with advances in AI, Daly notes that there were initially many companies working in this space, seeing an explosion of competitors in 2014 with around 50 companies in the field. “All but 3 or 4 are gone now as the reality of how complex the technology is and how challenging operating as a clinical company hits home,” he says, before adding that there appears to be another wave of competitors surfacing.

“In reality, we’ve spent so much time learning from our mistakes in developing our AI, this is one of our main points of difference,” cautions the Skin Analytics founder. “It is too easy to get started and think you’ve made a great algorithm, but when you test it in the real world — and you can only do this with a prospective clinical study — the performance just isn’t there. Not only have we done that, but we use our research strategy to ask questions that give us the data to continue to improve our algorithms. There is no shortcut for this, you need to test, improve and repeat”.

Another key differentiator is that you can’t ‘fake it until you make it’ in a highly regulated industry and the processes that come with that. “You have to build them into the fabric of your company and it’s slow and painful,” adds Daly. “Medical device companies have to find a way to innovate quickly within a safety critical environment and I’m very proud of the way our team has built that ability, and continues to do so”.

PUBG said on Tuesday Chinese giant Tencent Games will no longer be the publishing partner of the popular game in India as it attempts to allay concerns of New Delhi, which banned the game and 117 other apps last week.

Prior to Tuesday’s announcement, Tencent Games published and distributed PUBG Mobile games in India.

“Moving forward, PUBG Corporation will take on all publishing responsibilities within the country. As the company explores ways to provide its own PUBG experience for India in the near future, it is committed to doing so by sustaining a localized and healthy gameplay environment for its fans,” PUBG Corporation said in a statement.

The title, the most popular mobile game in the country to date, said it is “actively monitoring the situation around the recent bans” and is committed to “engaging with its passionate player base in India.”

New Delhi banned 118 Chinese apps last week over privacy and security concerns. The move followed a similar ban on nearly five dozen Chinese apps including TikTok in June on similar grounds. India has not named China specifically in either of its ban orders — though its moves have been attributed to the geo-political tensions between the two nuclear-armed nations.

Prior to the ban, PUBG had about 40 million monthly active users in India and was by far the top app by revenue ahead of Netflix and Tinder in the country, according to one of the most popular mobile insight firms — data of which an industry executive shared with TechCrunch.

“PUBG Corporation fully understands and respects the measures taken by the government as the privacy and security of player data is a top priority for the company. It hopes to work hand-in-hand with the Indian government to find a solution that will allow gamers to once again drop into the battlegrounds while being fully compliant with Indian laws and regulations,” said South Korea-headquartered PUBG Corporation.

Google and Apple have pulled PUBG games and other apps from their respective app stores in compliance with New Delhi’s order. But unlike other apps that have been banned including TikTok, PUBG games are still operational for existing users in India, several users said. Though that may change soon.

Tencent also appears to be involved in the development of PUBG titles (PUBG MOBILE Nordic Map: Livik and PUBG MOBILE Lite), which further complicates the matter in India.

“While publishing duties could go to PUBG Corp, will Tencent still handle development of the game? If so, wouldn’t that still be in violation of the way data privacy laws here in India work? This move appears to be a bandaid solution if Tencent still develops the game,” tweeted Rishi Alwani, a long-time analyst of Indian gaming market and publisher of news outlet the Mako Reactor.

Marketing technology — and specifically tools that help companies leverage the internet to connect with customers in a way that is compliant with a new wave of data protection and privacy policies — continues to see a lot of traction with businesses and investors. In the latest development, Sarbacane, the French company that makes the Mailify SaaS-based email and text marketing platform, along with other other martech software, has raised $27 million, funding that it plans to use to continue building more technology in areas like AI-based marketing automation, as well as to continue its international expansion.

French investment company IDI is leading the investment with a $10 million stake, with management — led by founder Mathieu Tarnus — also investing. Tarnus has been and remains the majority shareholder. Paul de Fombelle, the COO who was on the founding team of the company, said the valuation is around $45 million with this investment.

Sarbacane — an instrument that has dual (relevant) meanings, an ear trumpet (for hearing better), and a blowpipe for sending out darts — is not exactly a startup in the strictest sense. The company is based out of the north of France, in a town called Hem, and it has been around for nearly 20 years — founded in 2001. It is already profitable, and it has raised some money in the past but has never disclosed how much.

It has some 10,000 customers on its books already, with a heavy emphasis on small and medium businesses, but also government agencies and a number of big names such as Christian Dior, L’Occitane, Mondial Relay and Warner Music, which do some self-service but also lean on consultancy from Sarbacane itself to help fine-tune how it all works.

All this, actually, makes Sarbacane quite a typical European startup, where we see a lot of businesses bootstrap themselves for years and turn profitable before at some point tapping investors, while still staying private, to take some money to boost growth. (In fact, just yesterday Mollie out of the Netherlands announced funding around a similar kind of growth/profit story, but there are a number of other examples across the whole of the continent.)

Sarbacane’s flagship product is an SaaS-based tool that lets businesses craft, send out, measure and respond to marketing campaigns over email and text messaging, which is sold as Sarbacane in France and Mailify outside of Francophonic countries. It competes with the likes of Mailchimp (the US-based martech ‘startup’ that’s also been around for ages and remains bootstrapped) and accounts for the majority of the $13 million in revenues that Sarbacane made last year, and the $16 million it expects to make this year.

Other products that it has moved into over the years include Layout for email design; Sarbacane Chat (for running chatbots); and Touchdown (a kind of all-in-one, multichannel marketing platform akin to Salesforce’s or Adobe’s marketing clouds), and it has more recently started to also grow by way of acquisition, acquiring the Datananas B2B prospecting platform to more deeper into CRM.

De Fombelle said that the company plans to use some of the funding to continue making acquisitions as we continue to see more consolidation in the fragmented world of marketing technology.

“We raised this money because in Europe, the players in email marketing and marketing automation are ten times smaller than they are in the US,” he said. “The market is huge in Europe but still very fragmented and so we have a big ambition to be a part of the consolidation.”

There has been a large swing in recent years where people have become acutely aware of marketing technology, but not for a great reason: it’s because of the gradual realisation of just how much of our data is sucked up and used by a wide range of companies to profile us and sell more to us in the future. Sometimes this is used in pretty nefarious ways, sometimes innocuously, sometimes actually quite usefully. Now, a wave of new regulations is making us all too aware of just how much of this happens, and is in the most proactive cases helping us cut down some of those vines, by giving us more control over how our data is used online.

All that potentially puts martech companies, and businesses using a lot of marketing and advertising technology, into an interesting, and sometimes not great, position, but de Fombelle said that in fact it’s been a big benefactor of the rise of GDPR, not least because it has always had a strong view on data protection and put a lot of the measures required by the regulations in place well before they were conceived.

That’s one reason why investors are interested even if Sarbacane itself hasn’t been trumpeting its own brand much.

“The Sarbacane Group is accelerating its development through the growth of its various brands, all of which are leaders in their respective markets. We are thrilled to partner with the team in the implementation of this strategy, and in its diversification and acquisition projects in the field of marketing software and B2B services,” said Julien Bentz, a new investor and member of IDI’s executive committee.

Byju’s has raised $500 million in a new financing round that valued the Indian online learning platform at $10.8 billion, a source familiar with the matter said.

The round is lead by Silver Lake, and existing investors Tiger Global, General Atlantic and Owl Ventures have also participated in it, Byju’s said in a statement, but declined to reveal the size of the round and its valuation.

“We are excited to welcome a strong partner like Silver Lake to the BYJU’S family,” said Byju Raveendran, co-founder and CEO of Byju’s in a statement. “We are fortunate to be in a sector of positive relevance during this crisis. This has brought online learning to the forefront and is helping parents, teachers and students experience and understand its value. Our classrooms are changing possibly for the first time in 100 years and I’m really excited about the opportunities that we have to redefine the future of learning.”

Byju’s prepares students pursuing undergraduate and graduate-level courses, and in recent years it has also expanded its catalog to serve all school-going students. Tutors on Byju’s app tackle complex subjects using real-life objects such as pizza and cake.

The growing valuation of Byju’s comes as education startups report massive growth in their usage. Unacademy, a Facebook-backed edtech startup, nearly tripled its valuation in a span of months with its new $150 million fundraise last week.

As the coronavirus outbreak began to spread in India earlier this year, New Delhi enforced a nationwide lockdown that saw schools close across the nation. This has led many parents to explore digital learning services alternatives for their kids.

Even as most Indians tend not to pay for online services — just ask Facebook, which has amassed over 400 million users in India and makes little in the country — the education category has become an outlier. Indian families continue to spend heavily on their children’s education in hopes of paving the way for a better future.

Since the lockdown, Byju’s has added 20 million new students on its platform. Today, the app has over 64 million registered students and 4.2 million annual paid subscriptions. The startup said it has also doubled its revenue.

“We are delighted to lead this investment and partner with Byju and his impressive team of education technology pioneers in their mission to help children in India and around the world achieve their true potential,” said Greg Mondre, Co-CEO of Silver Lake in a statement. “We look forward to working with them as BYJU’S builds on and accelerates its compelling growth trajectory by forging new partnerships and continuing to cultivate a comprehensive ecosystem of innovative educational offerings.”

New investment firm Do Ventures announced today the first closing of its fund for Vietnamese startups, which is backed by several of Asia’s most notable institutional investors. Called Do Ventures Fund I, the investment vehicle has hit more than half of its $50 million target, with limited partners including Korean internet giant Naver; Sea, whose businesses include Garena and Shopee; Singapore-based venture capital firm Vertex Holdings; and Korean app developer Woowa Brothers.

Do Ventures was founded by general partners Nguyen Manh Dung, former CEO of CyberAgent Ventures Vietnam and Thailand, and Vy Hoang Uyen Le, previously a general partner at ESP Capital. Its first fund will focus on early-stage companies and invest in seed to Series B rounds.

Both of its founders have a long track record of working with Vietnamese startups. Nguyen was an early investor in companies including Tiki.vn, one of Vietnam’s largest online marketplaces; food delivery platform Foody.vn; and digital marketing company CleverAds. Before she became an investor, Le was a serial entrepreneur and served as chief executive officer at fashion e-commerce company Chon.vn and VinEcom, the e-commerce project launched by Vietnamese real estate conglomerate Vingroup.

In an email, Le told TechCrunch that Do Ventures Fund I is industry agnostic, but will structure its investments into two tiers. The first will consist of B2C platforms, including education, healthcare and social commerce, that serve younger users, and are addressing changes in consumer behavior caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. The second tier will include B2B platforms that can provide services for companies in the first tier, and allow them to expand regionally with SaaS solutions for data and e-commerce services.

Do Ventures’ founders say that between 2016 and 2019, the amount of startup funding in Vietnam grew eight-fold to $861 million last year. But there are still only a few funds that focus specifically on the country, which means early-stage Vietnamese startups often run into funding gaps.

One of the firm’s goals is to help founders weather the impact of COVID-19, so their companies can continue growing in spite of the pandemic.

“We hope tech startups can enable traditional businesses to digitize faster and better adapt to the new normal,” Le said. “For consumers, we hope tech startups can transform customer experience in all aspects of daily life, and bring more accessibility to consumers in remote areas.”

The firm will take a hands-on approach to its investments, helping companies develop new business models. Do Ventures plans to set up an automatic reporting system that collects data about how its portfolio companies are performing, which its general partners say will enable them support startups’ operations, including product development, business organization, supply chain development, and overseas expansion.

Fintech startup Revolut is expanding to Japan. After testing the service with 10,000 users, anybody can now sign up and open an account. The company originally obtained its authorization to operate from Japan’s Finance Service Agency in 2018.

When you open an account, you get an electronic wallet and a Visa debit card. You can top up your account and spend money with your card, a virtual card, Apple Pay, Google Pay, etc. Revolut sends you instant notifications and lets you freeze and unfreeze your card from the app.

You can also send money to other Revolut users or a bank account. Like in other countries, Revolut lets you exchange money in the app and send money in other currencies. Many users have taken advantage of the service to travel and pay less in foreign exchange fees.

Users in Japan will also be able to create vaults and put some money aside by rounding up transactions and creating recurring transactions. And that’s about it for now.

The company has already launched premium plans in Japan, but it doesn’t give you a lot of benefits other than lower fees on foreign exchange, different card designs, better support and the ability to buy airport lounge access with LoungeKey Pass.

Unlike in the U.K. and Europe, you won’t be able to buy cryptocurrencies, trade stocks, buy insurance products, create Revolut Junior accounts for your children, etc. Revolut is really trying to build a super app in its home country and has massively expanded its feature set over the years.

The company promises that some features, such as cryptocurrency and stock trading, will be available globally. But there’s no release date just yet. So let’s see how the product evolves in the coming months.

Revolut is currently available in the U.K., Europe, the U.S., Singapore and Australia. It currently has 13 million customers.