Stride.VC, the London early-stage VC firm founded by Fred Destin and podcaster Harry Stebbings, is losing Paris-based partner, Pia d’Iribarne, TechCrunch has learned.
According to a regulatory filing, d’Iribarne’s partnership officially ended today, a little more than a year and a half after her appointment as Stride’s third investment partner was announced.
Contacted by TechCrunch, both d’Iribarne and Stride have confirmed her departure, but declined to comment further, including what she’s up to next. I understand, however, that d’Iribarne will retain her board seats on Stride portfolio companies Strapi, impala and jow.
For the time being, d’Iribarne’s next destination remains unconfirmed, although sources tell me she may be in the early of stages of putting together a venture fund of her own. She has spoken in the past of her “entrepreneurial” ambitions — then in relation to leaving Accel to join newly-launched Stride — so I wouldn’t be surprised were this to happen. As always, watch this space.
Meanwhile, d’Iribarne isn’t the only member of Stride’s team to leave since the firm’s launch in late 2018. Operating partner Arj Soysa left after just over a year and is now a finance director at Mubadala Capital in Europe.
Separately, founding partner Harry Stebbings recently unveiled that alongside Stride he is now operating an $8.3 million micro VC fund of his own. Called 20VC — named after his “The Twenty Minute VC” podcast — the plan is to invest in U.S. startups across various stages alongside “tier 1” co-investors.
We’ve all been in a video conference, especially this year, when the neighbor started mowing the lawn or kids were playing outside your window — and it can get pretty loud. Cisco, which owns the WebEx video conferencing service wants to do something about that, and late yesterday it announced it was going to acquire BabbleLabs, a startup that can help filter out background noise.
BabbleLabs has a very particular set of skills. It uses artificial intelligence to enhance the speaking voice, while filtering out those unwanted background noises that seem to occur whenever you happen to be in a meeting.
Interestingly enough, Cisco also sees this as a kind of privacy play by removing background conversation. Jeetu Patel, senior vice president and general manager in the Cisco Security and Applications Business Unit, says that this should go a long way toward improving the meeting experience for Cisco users.
“Their technology is going to provide our customers with yet another important innovation — automatically removing unwanted noise — to continue enabling exceptional Webex meeting experiences,” Patel, who was at Box for many years before joining Cisco recently, said in a statement.
In a blog post, BabbleLabs CEO and co-founder Chris Rowen wrote that conversations about being acquired by Cisco began just recently, and the deal came together pretty quickly. “We quickly reached a common view that merging BabbleLabs into the Cisco Collaboration team could accelerate our common vision dramatically,” he wrote.
BabbleLabs, which launched three years ago and raised $18 million, according to Crunchbase, had an interesting, but highly technical idea. That can sometimes be difficult to translate into a viable commercial product, but makes a highly attractive acquisition target for a company like Cisco.
Brent Leary, founder and principal analyst at CRM Essentials, says this acquisition could be seen as part of a broader industry consolidation. “We’re seeing consolidation taking place as the big web conferencing players are snapping up smaller players to round out their platforms,” he said.
He added, “WebEx may not be getting the attention that Zoom is, but it still has a significant presence in the enterprise, and this acquisition will allow them to keep improving their offering,”
The deal is expected to close in the current quarter after regulatory approval. Upon closing, BabbleLabs employees will become part of Cisco’s Collaboration Group.
Like other accelerators, Brinc hasn’t let 2020 get in the way of its program for early-stage startups. The firm is known for focusing on food technology, health tech, clean energy, and hardware, and has a knack for finding some of the most interesting startups in those spaces. Today, we joined Brinc’s first online Demo Day to meet startups from its spring Hong Kong programs, as well as its hardware and IoT program in India.
Here are the startups in alphabetical order:
Based in Singapore, Aurora Food focuses on glycemic-lowering technology that can be used in ingredients for baked goods that are safe for diabetic people to eat because they release sugar more slowly. It wants to provide a healthier and tastier solution than current market offerings — sugar reduction compromises taste and artificial sweeteners can create health hazards. It plans to monetize through a B2B model by selling dessert mix to the likes of bakeries and confectionaries.
From Australia, iMAGsystems makes professional audiovisual equipment and software. AV systems can be difficult to set up, and iMAGsystems wants to solve headaches with its ‘AV over IP’ networking technology, which delivers audio and visual signals using a client’s existing cable infrastructure, and comes with software to monitor performance and prevent issues before they disrupt meetings and events. The company began shipping in 2017 and is working to launch an SaaS solution soon.
Part of Brinc’s India hardware and IoT program, Enlite Research takes a new approach to building management that uses bluetooth mesh (BLE mesh) systems and sensors to collect data, combined with AI-based software. Enlite’s goal is to reduce the cost of managing small and medium-sized commercial buildings while also reducing greenhouse gas emissions.
American startup Fybraworks Foodsis a new entrant in the substitute meat market, using fermentation and protein ingredients to replicate the taste and texture of meat. Its technology combines animal-free muscle proteins and umami flavor of mushroom, and the final products target both pet and human food ingredients.
Another startup from America, Laava Tech, is creating indoor LED grow lights for farmers that it says reduces energy consumption by up to 90%, while increasing crop yield at the same time. It uses control units that provide lights matching the photosynthetic process and sensors to collect data on plant conditions, which feed into its machine learning system.
Run by former Singaporean government R&D staff,MyrLabs’ flagship product is NaviStar, an indoor positioning system that enables robots to move around facilities with more flexibility instead of sticking to fixed paths. Its technology means that companies, including those in the logistics industry, can find new use cases for robots, increasing their productivity. It’s also working on a wearable for blind and visually impaired people.
Orbillion Bio, a food-tech startup that was part of a UC Berkeley accelerator program, uses “lab on a chip” technology to create to cultured meat products using a small tissue sample from heritage cattle breeds. The team of scientists and engineers works to find the optimal meat cell lines that are both nutritious and tasty, and will appeal to other agricultural and food companies.
Singaporean startup Shandi Global is developing technology that will enable it to manufacture plant-based meat substitutes that have amino acid and protein profiles that are similar to real meats, and thus have more flexible use cases than the current offerings of patties, nuggets and sausages. The company’s tech allows it to modify plants at a molecular level and offers meat alternatives at more affordable prices as it plans to supply to restaurants, online grocers and big-box retailers.
Based in France and the U.S., STYCKRtargets the parametric insurance market, which is currently restricted to natural catastrophes. Its end-to-end risk management platform enables clients to track physical goods and other assets as they make their way through the supply chain. Its platform consists of a small, self-powered device that is attached to goods and sends data to STYCKR’s SaaS risk-prediction and management SaaS platform.
Hong Kong startupSymphony has developed plug-and-play sensors that monitor vibrations from machines, sends data to cloud-based software that uses AI to analyze how they are performing, and visualize the data on an app with maintenance advice. This helps facilities predict potential issues before machines shutdown, resulting in expensive downtime.
Canadian startup TROES develops energy storage technology using lithium-ion (LiFePO4) technology. Its indoor, outdoor and container systems are modular, which means they can be customized to meet the needs of clients who include middle-market power distributors. The aim of TROES’ products is to increase the efficiency of power storage, which can result in lower utility bills and fewer shortages. It sees itself taking on power solution giants like Tesla, LG Chem, and BYD.
UpperMed, a med-tech startup based in Singapore, has developed a portable device called PD Care that makes it easier for peritoneal dialysis patients to conduct dialysis by themselves. PD Care gives patients more flexibility over where and when they need to change dialysis fluid. It automatically records its flow rate, transparency and volume, and syncs all data to an app. It starts with a to-consumer model selling devices and charging for its app, and plans to later target organizations by developing hospital management systems.
Another member of Brinc’s India program, Vacus Research takes a new approach to indoor positioning through the use of its patented “virtual radio fencing.” This allows for more precise tracking of people and objects within a space. Use cases include monitoring high-value assets, tracking occupancy, disaster management, and most recently, contact tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Z Imaging is an American startup that develops augmented reality tools, including its surgical navigation and robotics platform, to help doctors perform surgeries. Incubated at Harvard i-lab and backed by Y Combinator and Plug and Play, the startup focuses on ventriculostomy, a common surgical procedure to drain excess cerebrospinal fluid from the head. Its goal is to reduce the time it takes to perform ventriculostomies while improving safety and accuracy.
Finix, a startup that provides payments-related services to other companies, announced it has extended its Series B financing with a $30 million investment led by Lightspeed Venture Partners and American Express Ventures. The fintech startup has now raised over $96 million in venture capital. According to CEO and co-founder Richie Serna, $90 million of that total was grabbed in the last year alone.
Finix declined to disclose its revenue, revenue growth, new valuation, current profitability, or number of customers in an interview with TechCrunch. Serna was willing to disclose that Finix’s transaction volume more than quadrupled from Q2 2019 to Q2 2020 as a comp for customer growth, but declined to be more granular on the changing data.
Finix helps other startups set up their own payment processing infrastructure systems in-house. Sometimes, businesses will go to a company like Stripe, which takes processing fees and transaction fees, to add payments to their service. Finix helps businesses bring Stripe-esque services and payment infrastructure, in-house. The idea is that companies can thus pocket the extra change that third-party payment providers would have otherwise cut away from transactions, minus the cost that Finix charges them. Thus Finix works as the plumbing inside of a startup, while a company like Stripe is more similar to a plug-and-play system.
It would be fascinating to know Finix’s customer breakdown because it would give a sense of how healthy it’s business really is. The company makes money by charging customers a software fee and a sliding fee based on the number of payments it processes. Even though it doesn’t make money on a per-transaction basis, it does benefit from customers that have high transaction volume.
Finix’s sweet spot for ideal customers was once businesses in the $50 million in transactions per year bucket. Serna would not comment on if its focus has changed. Finix recently launched Flex, a new underwriting model that is aimed at helping businesses on archaic systems reduce switching costs between payment providers.
“We want to basically be the payment provider for a company at any stage of their high growth or stabilized growth perspective,” he said.
The new cash will be used to double Finix’s team of 85 people by mid-2021.
The fintech world was unevenly impacted by the coronavirus pandemic, which is still happening. Startups helping small mom-and-pop stores bring on money, like Square, likely saw dips in transactions as people stayed at home and businesses shut down. Finix sits on the other range of payments, enabling online merchants and apps to bring on payments. The boom in ecommerce amid these unprecedented times might be why a business like Finix is growing like it is 2019. As another data point, Serna said its total customers have grown monthly.
Serna, again noting Finix’s transaction volume multiple of 4.5x from Q2 2019 to Q2 2020, says that the coronavirus pandemic has not confronted the business with “many challenges.”
For now, it appears, Finix’s extension round is a story of strength versus survival.
Desktop Metal’s had no shortage of investor interest in its business during in its half-decade existence. To date, the metal 3D printing company has raised $430 million, becoming one of the fastest U.S. companies to achieve unicorn status in the process.
The Burlington, Massachusetts company plans to list on the New York Stock Exchange under the ticker symbol “DM” by merging with Trine Acquisition Corp. The black-check company announced its own initial public offering of $261 million in March of last year.
Under this new deal, Trine will merge with DesktopMetal to create a company worth up to $2.5 billion, by its own estimates. Desktop Metal’s most recent valuation from early last year had the company at $1.5 billion. The SPAC-led deal could therefore provide an attractive mark-up for Desktop Metal investors.
The SPAC-led public debut will generate as much as $575 in “gross proceeds,” according to a release describing the deal. Trine will contribute $300 million, with another $275 million from “committed common stock PIPE at $10.00 per share.” The term PIPE stands for “private investment in public equity,” and allows for more money to flow into SPAC-led deals when required.
Post-SPAC plans
In addition to furthering its own R&D efforts, Desktop Metal plans to make its own acquisitions, in what it refers to as a “constructive consolidation” of the additive manufacturing/3D printing industry. The deal would position Desktop Metal as a primary player in what it’s deemed “additive manufacturing 2.0” — essentially a second wave in 3D printing innovation that could finally see the technology fulfilling its potential to truly upend manufacturing afteryears and decades of hype.
“We are at a major inflection point in the adoption of additive manufacturing, and Desktop Metal is leading the way in this transformation,” founder and CEO Rick Fulop said in a release.
It can be difficult to distinguish the hope from the truly impactful technologies in an industry like this, but Desktop Metal has certainly demonstrated some impressive breakthroughs in the five years since its founding. In addition to high profile investors like Lux Capital, NEA, Kleiner Perkins, Ford Motor Company, Google Ventures and Koch Disruptive Technologies, the company has struck a number of big name partnerships. Ford and BMW have both seen enough promise in the company’s potential to disrupt auto-making to sign on as investors.
Grid, a SaaS startup founded in Iceland that lets you turn spreadsheets into visual “narratives,” has closed $12 million in Series A funding.
The round is led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from existing investors BlueYard Capital, Slack Fund, Acequia Capital and other unnamed “strategic” partners. The injection of capital will be used by the company to bring its product to market and for further product development.
Founded in late 2018 by Hjalmar Gislason — who was previously behind DataMarket, an early mover in the “Data-as-a-Service” space — Grid is on a mission to change the way knowledge workers interact with data, starting with spreadsheets. Opening up its beta today, the SaaS enables you to turn spreadsheet workbooks into visual and interactive websites so that the data residing in them can be better communicated to various audiences.
“Grid provides a way for the everyday spreadsheet user to easily create visual and interactive narratives on top of existing spreadsheets and securely share them using the web,” Gislason explains.
“Most data tools, even the most accessible ‘self-service’ tools, are power user tools — meaning it takes time and deliberate effort to learn how to use them, and the people that do become the go-to-people within their organizations when it comes to analysis, data-driven decisions and data narratives. The tool everyone else uses to get stuff done in their day-to-day work is the spreadsheet”.
Gislason frames the initial problem the startup is focusing on as the moment when someone has pulled together data or built a model in a spreadsheet and now has to communicate it with someone else. “The most common method, even today, is attaching an Excel file to an email. In doing so the spreadsheet author is giving up control over the spreadsheet, how its read and further distributed,” he says.
Furthermore, that content is painful to consume on mobile devices and it is difficult making sure everyone has the latest version. Sharing spreadsheets in the cloud is an improvement but is still far from optimum.
To overcome this, people typically copy and paste charts and tables out of spreadsheets into PowerPoints and PDFs and distribute these as static artefacts, which solves the control problem but is difficult to create and maintain as it disconnects the presentation from “the underlying data and models”. Grid aims to change this.
During Grid’s private beta period, the startup saw two core use-cases. The first was model presentation, such as a consultant or a business analyst that has built a spreadsheet model and needs to communicate how the inputs affect the outcomes. The second is reporting, seeing Grid used by anyone that needs to regularly report data they’ve pulled together in a spreadsheet.
“And that’s a lot of people!” adds Gislason. “Our users like the combination of text and data visualization that Grid offers, in addition to the fact that the Grid documents are directly linked to the underlying workbooks so that any change in the workbook, even a local Excel file, is immediately reflected in the online report”.
Grid, a SaaS startup founded in Iceland that lets you turn spreadsheets into visual “narratives,” has closed $12 million in Series A funding.
The round is led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA), with participation from existing investors BlueYard Capital, Slack Fund, Acequia Capital and other unnamed “strategic” partners. The injection of capital will be used by the company to bring its product to market and for further product development.
Founded in late 2018 by Hjalmar Gislason — who was previously behind DataMarket, an early mover in the “Data-as-a-Service” space — Grid is on a mission to change the way knowledge workers interact with data, starting with spreadsheets. Opening up its beta today, the SaaS enables you to turn spreadsheet workbooks into visual and interactive websites so that the data residing in them can be better communicated to various audiences.
“Grid provides a way for the everyday spreadsheet user to easily create visual and interactive narratives on top of existing spreadsheets and securely share them using the web,” Gislason explains.
“Most data tools, even the most accessible ‘self-service’ tools, are power user tools — meaning it takes time and deliberate effort to learn how to use them, and the people that do become the go-to-people within their organizations when it comes to analysis, data-driven decisions and data narratives. The tool everyone else uses to get stuff done in their day-to-day work is the spreadsheet”.
Gislason frames the initial problem the startup is focusing on as the moment when someone has pulled together data or built a model in a spreadsheet and now has to communicate it with someone else. “The most common method, even today, is attaching an Excel file to an email. In doing so the spreadsheet author is giving up control over the spreadsheet, how its read and further distributed,” he says.
Furthermore, that content is painful to consume on mobile devices and it is difficult making sure everyone has the latest version. Sharing spreadsheets in the cloud is an improvement but is still far from optimum.
To overcome this, people typically copy and paste charts and tables out of spreadsheets into PowerPoints and PDFs and distribute these as static artefacts, which solves the control problem but is difficult to create and maintain as it disconnects the presentation from “the underlying data and models”. Grid aims to change this.
During Grid’s private beta period, the startup saw two core use-cases. The first was model presentation, such as a consultant or a business analyst that has built a spreadsheet model and needs to communicate how the inputs affect the outcomes. The second is reporting, seeing Grid used by anyone that needs to regularly report data they’ve pulled together in a spreadsheet.
“And that’s a lot of people!” adds Gislason. “Our users like the combination of text and data visualization that Grid offers, in addition to the fact that the Grid documents are directly linked to the underlying workbooks so that any change in the workbook, even a local Excel file, is immediately reflected in the online report”.
Xiaomi reported a revenue of $7.77 billion for the quarter that ended in June this year, up 3.1% since the same period last year and up 7.7% over the previous quarter as the Chinese smartphone maker sees recovery in most of its overseas markets.
The company said its profit in the second quarter stood at $650 million, up 129.8% year-on-year and 108% compared to Q1 2020.
Its smartphone sales, which still account for the bulk of its revenue, has recovered in most of its international markets. Excluding India, the average daily number of overseas smartphone activations reached 120% of the pre-pandemic level recorded in January 2020, it said.
India, its biggest market outside of China, is a different story. New Delhi ordered a nationwide lockdown in late March that resulted in closing of most shops across the nation. Package delivery of “non-essential” items ordered online were also restricted for weeks.
Even as India, where Xiaomi has been the top smartphone vendor for the last 12 quarters, has eased lockdown restrictions in the months since, daily number of smartphone activations were still at 72% (compared to January 2020) as of last month, Xiaomi said in its quarterly earnings presentation today.
Xiaomi said local production yields are to be blamed. “As the production capacity had not yet returned to the normal level, our sales were still limited by the production constraints,” it said.
The company has found a silver lining in Europe. In the second quarter of 2020, according to research firm Canalys, Xiaomi’s smartphone shipments grew by 64.9% year-on-year in Europe, achieving a total market share of 16.8%.
In Western Europe, Xiaomi’s smartphone shipments grew 115.9% year-on-year, accounting for a 12.4% market share. Similarly, according to Canalys, Xiaomi commanded the top smartphone vendor position in Spain, second in France, and 4th in Germany and Italy.
The company said shipment of its premium smartphones — those that sell at retail price of €300 ($350) or more — grew 99.2% year-on-year in international markets. “Driven by the higher proportion of sales from mid- to high-end smartphones, the average selling price of the company’s smartphones increased by 11.8% YoY and 7.5% QoQ,” it added.
The smartphone giant, which has been attempting to grow its advertisement business, said there were 343.5 million MIUI users as of June 30 this year, up 23.3% year-over-year. MIUI is Xiaomi’s custom Android operating system that runs on the vast majority of its smartphones. (Xiaomi has also launched a handful of smartphones with pure Android version.)
As the company’s smartphone install base grows, its advertising revenue is also surging. In the second quarter of 2020, its advertising revenue increased by 23.2% year-on-year to $450 million, it said.
Building out its previous commitment, the White House is announcing a $1 billion investment into two of tech’s most promising frontiers, AI and quantum computing.
Last year, the Trump administration rolled out an executive order on AI declaring its intention to bolster U.S. dominance in the field, but the order didn’t address much in the way of funding its plans. This February, the Trump administration called for more than two billion dollars to be invested in non-defense AI and quantum research by 2022.
The White House’s new initiative will fund a series of academic and private sector R&D hubs linked to federal agencies to work on foundational problems and “pursue transformational advances” across topics like quantum computing, machine learning, computer vision.
In a statement, U.S. CTO Michael Kratsios called the institutes “world-class hubs for accelerating American innovation and building the 21st century American workforce.”
Five AI research institutes under the National Science Foundation (NSF) will receive $20 million each, along with two other institutes partnered with the USDA. The AI centers will be established as partnerships with existing academic research groups at the University of Colorado, University of Texas, University of Oklahoma, MIT, UC Davis and two different teams at the University of Illinois.
Five new Department of Energy-linked centers focused on quantum information science will benefit from a newly announced $625 million over five years. In a call discussing the new initiative, U.S. Under Secretary for Science Paul Dabbar argued that quantum science could be prove even more impactful than AI for U.S. national interests.
“We have high confidence that [this]… will be just as successful as the Apollo program or the Human Genome Program,” Dabbar said.
The new DOE quantum centers will be established at Brookhaven, Argonne, Fermi, Lawrence Berkeley and Oak Ridge national labs. According to Dabbar, the $625 million allocated by the DOE attracted significant interest from tech leaders in the private sector, with Microsoft and Intel among tech industry partners committing staff and equipment to help establish the new institutes.
The once-pioneering BlackBerry is pretty much out of the smartphone manufacturing game, but the Canadian company has been busy transitioning to providing software for connected devices, including smart cars. Now it’s brought that section of its business to China.
This week, BlackBerry announced that it will be powering the Level 3 driving domain controller of Xpeng, one of the most-funded electric vehicle startups in China and Tesla’s local challenger. Baked in Xpeng’s intelligent cockpit is BlackBerry’s operating system called QNX, which competes with the likes of Android and Linux to enter automakers’ next-gen models.
Sitting between BlackBerry and Xpeng’s tie-up is middleman Desay SV, which specializes in automotive system integrators like Aptiv. Desay SV, founded in 1986, has an illustrious past as a previously Sino-German joint venture that involved Siemens. The Huizhou-based company today supplies to Tier 1 automotive brands and original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) in China and around the world.
The kernel of Xpeng’s domain controller is NVIDIA’s Xavier cockpit chip for automated cars, so a good amount of software and hardware in Xpeng’s new car is based on foreign technologies.
The mass-produced Xpeng model in the spotlight is an electric sports sedan numbered P7. It features a processing unit that can calculate “the vehicle’s driving status and provides 360-degree omnidirectional perception with real-time monitoring of the surrounding environment to make safe driving decisions,” according to the announcement.
“Desay SV Automotive has extensive experience in intelligent cockpits, smart driving and connected services. Augmented with the safety expertise of BlackBerry QNX, together we can address the diverse needs of an auto industry that is undergoing meaningful transformation,” said John Wall, senior vice president and co-head of BlackBerry Technology Solutions, in a statement.
“To that end, it’s a real privilege to have BlackBerry technology powering the intelligent driving system within Xpeng Motors innovative new P7 system.”
The partnership arrives as Alibaba and Xiaomi backed-Xpeng is eying to raise up to $1.1 billion from its initial public offering in New York. Its Chinese rivals Li Auto and NIO raised similar amounts from their U.S. IPOs.
