Category: UNCATEGORIZED

Microsoft’s new Flight Simulator is a technological marvel that sets a new standard for the genre. But to recreate a world that feels real and alive and contains billions of buildings all in the right spots, Microsoft and Asobo Studios relied on the work of multiple partners.

One of those is the small Austrian startup blackshark.ai from Graz that, with a team of only about 50 people, recreated every city and town around the world with the help of AI and massive computing resources in the cloud.

Ahead of the launch of the new Flight Simulator, we sat down with Blackshark co-founder and CEO Michael Putz to talk about working with Microsoft and the company’s broader vision.

Blackshark is actually a spin-off of game studio Bongfish, the maker of World of Tanks: Frontline, Motocross Madness and the Stoked snowboarding game series. As Putz told me, it was actually Stoked that set the company on the way to what would become Blackshark.

“One of the first games we did in 2007 was a snowboarding game called Stoked and S Stoked Bigger Edition, which was one of the first games having a full 360-degree mountain where you could use a helicopter to fly around and drop out, land everywhere and go down,” he explained. “The mountain itself was procedurally constructed and described — and also the placement of obstacles of vegetation, of other snowboarders and small animals had been done procedurally. Then we went more into the racing, shooting, driving genre, but we still had this idea of positional placement and descriptions in the back of our minds.”

Bongfish returned to this idea when it worked on World of Tanks, simply because of how time-consuming it is to build such a huge map where every rock is placed by hand.

Based on this experience, Bongfish started building an in-house AI team. That team used a number of machine-learning techniques to build a system that could learn from how designers build maps and then, at some point, build its own AI-created maps. The team actually ended up using this for some of its projects before Microsoft came into the picture.

“By random chance, I met someone from Microsoft who was looking for a studio to help them out on the new Flight Simulator. The core idea of the new Flight Simulator simulator was to use Bing Maps as a playing field, as a map, as a background,” Putz explained.

But Bing Maps’ photogrammetry data only yielded exact 1:1 replicas of 400 cities — for the vast majority of the planet, though, that data doesn’t exist. Microsoft and Asobo Studios needed a system for building the rest.

This is where Blackshark comes in. For Flight Simulator, the studio reconstructed 1.5 billion buildings from 2D satellite images.

Now, while Putz says he met the Microsoft team by chance, there’s a bit more to this. Back in the day, there was a Bing Maps team in Graz, which developed the first cameras and 3D versions of Bing Maps. And while Google Maps won the market, Bing Maps actually beat Google with its 3D maps. Microsoft then launched a research center in Graz and when that closed, Amazon and others came in to snap up the local talent.

“So it was easy for us to fill positions like a Ph.D. in rooftop reconstruction,” Putz said. “I didn’t even know this existed, but this was exactly what we needed — and we found two of them.

“It’s easy to see why reconstructing a 3D building from a 2D map would be hard. Even figuring out a building’s exact outline isn’t easy.

“What we do basically in Flight Simulators is we looking at areas, 2D areas and then finding out footprints of buildings, which is actually a computer vision task,” said Putz. “But if a building is obstructed by a shadow of a tree, we actually need machine learning because then it’s not clear anymore what is part of the building and what is not because of the overlap of the shadow — but then machine learning completes the remaining part of the building. That’s a super simple example.”

While Blackshark was able to rely on some other data, too, including photos, sensor data and existing map data, it has to make a determination about the height of the building and some of its characteristics based on very little information.

The obvious next problem is figuring out the height of a building. If there is existing GIS data, then that problem is easy to solve, but for most areas of the world, that data simply doesn’t exist or isn’t readily available. For those areas, the team takes the 2D image and looks for hints in the image, like shadows. To determine the height of a building based on a shadow, you need the time of day, though, and the Bing Maps images aren’t actually timestamped. For other use cases the company is working on, Blackshark has that and that makes things a lot easier. And that’s where machine learning comes in again.

“Machine learning takes a slightly different road,” noted Putz. “It also looks at the shadow, we think — because it’s a black box, we don’t really know what it’s doing. But also, if you look at a flat rooftop, like a skyscraper versus a shopping mall. Both have mostly flat rooftops, but the rooftop furniture is different on a skyscraper than on a shopping mall. This helps the AI to learn when you label it the right way.”

And then, if the system knows that the average height of a shopping mall in a given area is usually three floors, it can work with that.

One thing Blackshark is very open about is that its system will make mistakes — and if you buy Flight Simulator, you will see that there are obvious mistakes in how some of the buildings are placed. Indeed, Putz told me that he believes one of the hardest challenges in the project was to convince the company’s development partners and Microsoft to let them use this approach.

“You’re talking 1.5 billion buildings. At these numbers, you cannot do traditional Q&A anymore. And the traditional finger-pointing in like a level of Halo or something where you say ‘this pixel is not good, fix it,’ does not really work if you develop on a statistical basis like you do with AI. So it might be that 20% of the buildings are off — and it actually is the case I guess in the Flight Simulator — but there’s no other way to tackle this challenge because outsourcing to hand-model 1.5 billion buildings is, just from a logistical level and also budget level, not doable.”

Over time, that system will also improve and since Microsoft streams a lot of the data to the game from Azure, users will surely see changes over time.

Labeling, though, is still something the team has to do simply to train the model, and that’s actually an area where Blackshark has made a lot of progress, though Putz wouldn’t say too much about it because it’s part of the company’s secret sauce and one of the main reasons why it can do all of this with just about 50 people.

“Data labels had not been a priority for our partners,” he said. “And so we used our own live labeling to basically label the entire planet by two or three guys […] It puts a very powerful tool and user interface in the hands of the data analysts. And basically, if the data analyst wants to detect a ship, he tells the learning algorithm what the ship is and then he gets immediate output of detected ships in a sample image.”

From there, the analyst can then train the algorithm to get even better at detecting a specific object like a ship, in this example, or a mall in Flight Simulator. Other geospatial analysis companies tend to focus on specific niches, Putz also noted, while the company’s tools are agnostic to the type of content being analyzed.

And that’s where Blackshark’s bigger vision comes in. Because while the company is now getting acclaim for its work with Microsoft, Blackshark also works with other companies around reconstructing city scenes for autonomous driving simulations, for example.

“Our bigger vision is a near-real-time digital twin of our planet, particularly the planet’s surface, which opens up a trillion use cases where traditional photogrammetry like a Google Earth or Apple Maps is doing is not helping because those are just simplified for photos clued on simple geometrical structures. For this we have our cycle where we have been extracting intelligence from aerial data, which might be 2D images, but it also could be 3Dpoint counts, which are already doing another project. And then we are visualizing the semantics.”

Those semantics, which describe the building in very precise detail, have one major advantage over photogrammetry: Shadow and light information is essentially baked into the images, making it hard to relight a scene realistically. Since Blackshark knows everything about that building it is constructing, it can then also place windows and lights in those buildings, which creates the surprisingly realistic night scenes in Flight Simulator.

Point clouds, which aren’t being used in Flight Simulator, are another area Blackshark is focusing on right now. Point clouds are very hard to read for humans, especially once you get very close. Blackshark uses its AI systems to analyze point clouds to find out how many stories a building has.

“The whole company was founded on the idea that we need to have a huge advantage in technology in order to get there, and especially coming from video games, where huge productions like in Assassin’s Creed or GTA are now hitting capacity limits by having thousands of people working on it, which is very hard to scale, very hard to manage over continents and into a timely delivered product. For us, it was clear that there need to be more automated or semi-automated steps in order to do that.”

And though Blackshark found its start in the gaming field — and while it is working on this with Microsoft and Asobo Studios — it’s actually not focused on gaming but instead on things like autonomous driving and geographical analysis. Putz noted that another good example for this is Unreal Engine, which started as a game engine and is now everywhere.

“For me, having been in games industry for a long time, it’s so encouraging to see, because when you develop games, you know how groundbreaking the technology is compared to other industries,” said Putz. “And when you look at simulators, from military simulators or industrial simulators, they always kind of look like shit compared to what we have in driving games. And the time has come that the game technologies are spreading out of the game stack and helping all those other industries. I think Blackshark is one of those examples for making this possible.”

TikTok had already offered its statement regarding the Trump Administration’s executive order that will ban the app from the U.S. if it’s not sold by Chinese-owned parent company ByteDance by a given deadline. Today, the company has additionally launched its own online informational hub and a new Twitter account designed to give it a dedicated platform for its collected responses, including those where it may need to respond more quickly — perhaps in response the President’s tweets, for example, or with other breaking news.

On Monday, TikTok launched tiktokus.info, a website that organizes the company’s statements, news coverage, “expert opinions,” FAQs and other resources in a single destination. Oddly titled “The Last Sunny Corner of the Internet,” TikTok makes the case for its app as a place where millions express themselves creatively. It also goes on record to flatly deny that it would ever provide TikTok U.S. user data to the Chinese government. And it spells out its commitments to areas like user safety and security, as well as its commitments to combatting election misinformation and interference, among other things.

TikTok also strongly refers to the growing concerns over U.S. user privacy and security as “rumors and misinformation” that are “proliferating in Washington and in the media.”

The app, in the months leading up to the executive order, had become the subject of a national security investigation in the U.S., due to its Chinese ownership. Despite TikTok’s proclamations that it would never share U.S. user data with China’s government, a Chinese law introduced in 2017 requires Chinese companies to do just that, when asked, raising concerns about to what extent TikTok would be able to decline such a request.

Meanwhile, a more recently published investigation by The WSJ found that TikTok had been tracking Android user data, specifically users’ MAC addresses, using a tactic that was in violation of Google’s Play Store policies and obfuscated using “an unusual added layer encryption.” TikTok ended the practice last November after 15 months of data collection, the report said. However, the U.S. Federal Trade Commission considers the MAC address “personally identifiable information” under its some privacy laws.

Beyond its round-up of on-the-record statements attributed to both TikTok and its execs, including TikTok CEO Kevin Mayer, the new website highlights any coverage it deems favorable. These links range from pro-TikTok op-eds that come out against the Trump E.O. to mere write-ups about this or that TikTok star’s success, or those that detail how advertisers and brands are using TikTok’s ad technology to reach consumers. These are bundled underneath the website’s “expert opinions” section, which also features statements from civil liberties organizations and others, like the ACLU, Information Technology & Innovation Foundation, Internet Governance Project, and more.

The website’s FAQ section answers questions like “has TikTok ever shared user data with the Chinese government?” and well, “would it,” if asked?. Both questions are answered, not surprisingly, “no.” It also clarifies that TikTok U.S. user data is stored in Virginia, with a back-up in Singapore and strict controls on employee access.

The company also launched “@tiktok_comms” on Twitter to share news and updates from the TikTok Communications Team. While it’s common for companies to have a social media presence to share their news, this account’s launch in particular seems designed with the goal of being able to more quickly react to changes and updates surrounding its U.S. ban, which has already been extended to 90 days after the issuing of the E.O., instead of 45 days, as before.

Creating a dedicated website to tout a company’s official position on a topic has become a more common tactic now that world governments are more actively involving itself in the tech industry’s business. Apple, for instance, launched a website to defend its App Store against U.S. antitrust complaints. Google today even co-opted its main Search page to lobby against a change to a law in Australia that would force it to share ad revenues with media businesses.

But the new website isn’t the only way TikTok has been fighting back to retain its place in the key U.S. market. The company also reportedly plans to challenge the constitutionality of the ban in a lawsuit. Plus, U.S. TikTok employees are planning their own legal challenge to the ban — all news of which will likely soon hit the new website and Twitter, we’d wager.

Small and medium businesses have been some of the hardest hit in the coronavirus pandemic, and in many cases that has had a knock-on effect on the companies that provide services to them. Now, a startup that built a whole business around loaning money to SMBs has been acquired by a giant in the world of credit as the fintech industry begins to size up what the “new normal” will look like when it comes to doing business with smaller businesses.

Kabbage, which had built a platform that uses machine learning algorithms to assess and loan out money to small business owners, is getting gobbled up by American Express, the two companies announced today. Amex says it has “millions” of small business customers and the addition of Kabbage’s loan and other financial services tools signifies that it plans to double down on that sector with a much wider range of offerings.

The financial terms of the deal are not being disclosed, but reports earlier this month put the value of the acquisition at up to $850 million. For some context, Kabbage had raised nearly $990 billion in debt and equity (and at least $3.5 billion in securitizations), and was valued at over $1.2 billion in its last equity round of $250 million, in 2017, led by SoftBank.

The acquisition comes at a tricky time not just for SMBs but also the fintech companies that serve them, and specifically for Kabbage itself, with all of them weathering the storms of COVID-19.

Amex’s acquisition, tellingly, will include employees, technology and financial data, but “Kabbage’s pre-existing loan portfolio is not included in the purchase agreement,” Amex noted in its press release.

As for what happens with that loan portfolio, a spokesperson for Kabbage said that there will be a separate entity that manages and services these loans at the time of close, and we are asking about the total value of that loan book as of today, but we’re still waiting to get a value for that loan book.

The spokesperson confirmed it includes not just loans that Kabbage had issued in its previous years of operation, but also loans made to SMBs in the US under the Paycheck Protection Program. As of last week these totalled $7 billion across nearly 300,000 loans; and just in 2019 Kabbage told TechCrunch it was on pace to loan out between $2.5 billion and $3 billion, so the pre-existing loan portfolio is not insignificant, and in current economic times, possibly one that comes with a lot of risk.

The news caps off an interesting run in the world of fintech that has seen Kabbage hit some significant ups and downs. The company attracted the attention of SoftBank and many other investors (and customers) the back of a fast-growing business based around the idea of using artificial intelligence to speed up the process of small businesses applying for and subsequently getting loans.

Disrupting traditional banks and their slow and often frustrating approach to evaluating loan applications, Kabbage taps a wide variety of sources, from traditional accounting statements through to social media signals, into its proprietary machine learning algorithms, in order to determine eligibility for issuing loans, and the terms under which a business would pay it back. It was successful enough that Kabbage was also offering its product as a white-label service to other loan providers (including the banks it was disrupting).

But have been tricky since February, with business dropping off a cliff after many SMBs were forced to shut their doors at the start of the pandemic — with too many of those closures becoming permanent. The company furloughed a significant proportion of its staff at the end of March, abruptly shut down its credit lines for SMBs in April, and then slowly brought things back online as one of the three biggest PPP lenders.

But PPP is a short-term program, and so a deal between Kabbage and Amex underscores how the two will join forces to bring a different approach to providing financial services to SMBs for the longer term, specifically by consolidating what they do under one roof.

“For several years, American Express has been expanding beyond our industry-leading commercial card products to offer our business customers a growing set of payment and working capital solutions,” said Anna Marrs, president of Global Commercial Services at American Express, in a statement. “This acquisition accelerates our plans to offer U.S. small businesses an easy and efficient way to manage their payments and cash flow digitally in one place, which is more critical than ever in today’s environment. By bringing together Kabbage’s innovative technology and talented team with our broad distribution capabilities and over 60 years of experience backing small businesses, we can better help our customers successfully emerge from this challenging period and beyond.”

“At Kabbage, we have always made the success of America’s small businesses our primary objective,” said Kabbage CEO and co-founder, Rob Frohwein, in a statement. “We have built a technology and data platform that provides them with the kind of capabilities and insights often reserved for larger businesses. By joining American Express , we can help more small businesses succeed with a fully digital suite of financial products to help them run and grow their companies.”

More to come.

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Earlier this month, La Famiglia, a Berlin-based VC firm that invests in seed-stage European B2B tech startups, disclosed that it raised a second fund totaling €50 million, up from its debut fund of €35 million in 2017.

The firm writes first checks of up to €1.5 million in European startups that use technology to address a significant need within an industry. It’s backed 37 startups to date (including Forto, Arculus and Graphy) and seeks to position itself based on its industry network, many of whom are LPs.

La Famiglia’s investors include the Mittal, Pictet, Oetker, Hymer and Swarovski families, industry leaders Voith and Franke, as well as the families behind conglomerates such as Hapag-Lloyd, Solvay, Adidas and Valentino. In addition, the likes of Niklas Zennström (Skype, Atomico), Zoopla’s Alex Chesterman and Personio’s Hanno Renner are also LPs.

Meanwhile, the firm describes itself as “female-led,” with founding partner Dr. Jeannette zu Fürstenberg and partner Judith Dada at the helm.

With the ink only just dry on the new fund, I put questions to the pair to get more detail on La Famiglia’s investment thesis and what it looks for in founders. We also discussed how the firm taps its “old economy” network, the future of industry 4.0 and what La Famiglia is doing — if anything — to ensure it backs diverse founders.

TechCrunch: You describe La Famiglia as B2B-focused, writing first checks of up to €1.5 million in European startups using technology to address a significant need within an industry. In particular, you cite verticals such as logistics and supply chain, the industrial space, and insurance, while also referencing sustainability and the future of work.

Can you elaborate a bit more on the fund’s remit and what you look for in founders and startups at such an early stage?

Jeannette zu Fürstenberg: Our ambition is to capture the fundamental shift in value creation across the largest sectors of our European economy, which are either being disrupted or enabled by digital technologies. We believe that opportunities in fields such as manufacturing or logistics will be shaped by a deep process understanding of these industries, which is the key differentiator in creating successful outcomes and a strength that European entrepreneurs can leverage.

We look for visionary founders who see a new future, where others only see fragments, with grit to push through adversity and a creative force to shape the world into being.

Judith Dada: Picking up a lot of signals from various expert sources in our network informs the opportunity landscape we see and allows us to invest with a strong sense of market timing. Next to verticals like insurance or industrial manufacturing, we also invest into companies tackling more horizontal opportunities, such as sustainability in its vast importance across industries, as well as new ways that our work is being transformed, for workers of all types. We look for opportunities across a spectrum of technological trends, but are particularly focused on the application potential of ML and AI.

A bearded Rihanna gyrates and sings about shining bright like a diamond. A female Jack Sparrow looks like she’d be a right laugh over a pint. The cartoon contours of The Incredible Hulk lend envious tint to Donald Trump’s awfully familiar cheek bumps.

Selfie culture has a fancy new digital looking glass: Reface (previously Doublicat) is an app that uses AI-powered deepfake technology to let users try on another face/form for size. Aka “face swap videos”, in its marketing parlance.

Deepfake technology — or synthesized media, to give it its less pejorative label — is just getting into its creative stride, according to Roman Mogylnyi, CEO and co-founder of RefaceAI, which makes the eponymous app whose creepily lifelike output you may have noticed bubbling up in your social streams in recent months.

The startup has Ukrainian founders — as well as Mogylnyi, there’s Oles Petriv, Yaroslav Boiko, Dima Shvets, Denis Dmitrenko, Ivan Altsybieiev and Kyle Sygyda — but the business is incorporated in the US. Doubtless it helps to be nearer to Hollywood studios whose video clips power many of the available face swaps. (Want to see Titanic‘s Rose Hall recast with Trump’s visage staring out of Kate Winslet’s body? No we didn’t either — but once you’ve hit the button it’s horribly hard to unsee… )

TechCrunch noticed a bunch of male friends WhatsApp-group-sharing video clips of themselves as scantily clad female singers and figured the developers must be onto something — a la Face App, or the earlier selfie trend of style transfer (a craze that was sparked by Prisma and cloned mercilessly by tech giants).

Reface’s deepfake effects are powered by a class of machine learning frameworks known as GANs (generative adversarial network) which is how it’s able to get such relatively slick results, per Mogylnyi. In a nutshell it’s generating a new animated face using the twin inputs (the selfie and the target video), rather than trying to mask one on top of the other.

Deepface technology has of course been around for a number of years, at this point, but the Reface team’s focus is on making the tech accessible and easy to use — serving it up as a push-button smartphone app with no need for more powerful hardware and near instant transformation from a single selfie snap. (It says it turns selfies into face vectors representing distinguishing user’s facial features — and pledges that uploaded photos are removed from its Google Cloud platform “within an hour”.)

No need for tech expertise nor lots of effort to achieve a lifelike effect. The inexorable social shares flowing from such a user friendly tech application then work to chalk off product marketing.

It was a similar story with the AI tech underpinning Prisma — which left that app open to merciless cloning, though it was initially only transforming photos. But Mogylnyi believes the team behind the video face swaps has enough of a head (ha!) start to avoid a similar fate.

He says usage of Reface has been growing “really fast” since it added high res videos this June — having initially launched with only far grainier GIF face swaps on offer.  In terms of metrics the startup us not disclosing active monthly users but says it’s had around 20 million downloads at this point across 100 countries. (On Google Play the app has almost a full five star rating, off of approaching 150k reviews.)

“I understand that an interest from huge companies might come. And it’s obvious. They see that it’s a great thing — personalization is the next trend, and they are all moving in the same direction, with Bitmoji, Memoji, all that stuff — but we see personalized, hyperrealistic face swapping as the next big thing,” Mogylnyi tells TechCrunch.

“Even for [tech giants] it takes time to create such a technology. Even speaking about our team we have a brilliant team, brilliant minds, and it took us a long time to get here. Even if you spawn many teams to work on the same problems surely you will get somewhere… but currently we’re ahead and we’re doing our best to work on new technologies to keep in pace,” he adds.

Reface’s app is certainly having a moment right now, bagging top download slots on the iOS App Store and Google Play in 100 countries — helped, along the way, by its reflective effects catching the eye of the likes of Elon Musk and Britney Spears (who Mogylnyi says have retweeted examples of its content).

But he sees this bump as just the beginning — predicting much bigger things coming down the sythensized pipe as more powerful features are switched on. The influx of bitesized celebrity face swaps signals an incoming era of personalized media, which could have a profoundly transformative effect on culture.

Mogylnyi’s hope is that wide access to synthensized media tools will increase humanity’s empathy and creativity — providing those who engage with the tech limitless chances to (auto)vicariously experience things they maybe otherwise couldn’t ever (or haven’t yet) — and so imagine themselves into new possibilities and lifestyles.

He reckons the tech will also open up opportunities for richly personalized content communities to grow up around stars and influencers — extending how their fans can interact with them.

“Right now the way influencers exist is only one way; they’re just giving their audience the content. In my understanding in our case we’ll let influencers have the possibility to give their audience access to the content and to feel themselves in it. It’s one of the really cool things we’re working on — so it will be a part of the platform,” he says.

“What’s interesting about new-gen social networks [like TikTok] is that people can both be like consumers and providers at the same time… So in our case people will also be able to be providers and consumers but on the next level because they will have the technology to allow themselves to feel themselves in the content.”

“I used to play basketball in school years but I had an injury and I was dreaming about a pro career but I had to stop playing really hard. I’ll never know how my life would have gone if I was a pro basketball player so I have to be a startup entrepreneur right now instead… So in the case with our platform I actually will have a chance to see how my pro basketball career would look like. Feel myself in the content and life this life,” he adds.

This vision is really the mirror opposite of the concerns that are typically attached to deepfakes, around the risk of people being taken in, tricked, shamed or otherwise manipulated by intentionally false imagery.

So it’s noteworthy that Reface is not letting users loose on their technology in a way that could risk an outpouring of problem content. For example, you can’t yet upload your own video to make into a deepfake — although the ability to do so is coming. For now, you have to pick from a selection of preloaded celebrity clips and GIFs which no one would mistake for the real-deal.

That’s a very deliberate decision, with Mogylnyi emphasizing they want to be responsible in how they bring the tech to market.

User generated video and a lot more — full body swaps are touted, next year — are coming, though. But before they turn on more powerful content generation functionality they’re working on building a counter tech to reliably detect such generated content. Mogylnyi says it will only open up usage once they’re confident of being able to spot their own fakes.

“It will be this autumn, actually,” he says of launching UGC video (plus the deepfake detection capability). “We’ll launch it with our Face Studio… which will be a tool for content creators, for small studios, for small post production studios, maybe some music video makers.”

“We also have five different technologies in our pipeline which we’ll show in the upcoming half a year,” he adds. “There are also other technologies and features based on current tech [stack] that we’ll be launching… We’ll allow users to swap faces in pictures with the new stack and also a couple of mechanics based on face swapping as well, and also separate technologies as well we’re aiming to put into the app.”

He says higher quality video swapping is another focus, alongside building out more technologies for post production studios. “Face Studio will be like an overall tool for people who want full access to our technologies,” he notes, saying the pro tool will launch later this year.

The Ukrainian team behind the app has been honing their deep tech chops for years — starting working together back in 2011 straight out of university and going on to set up a machine learning dev shop in 2013.

Work with post production studios followed, as they were asked to build face swapping technology to help budget-strapped film production studios do more while having to move their actors move around less.

By 2018, with plenty of expertise under their belt, they saw the potential for making deepface technology more accessible and user friendly — launching the GIF version of the app late last year, and going on to add video this summer when they also rebranded the app to Reface. The rest looks like it could be viral face swapping tech history…

So where does all this digital shapeshifting end up? “In our dreams and in our vision we see the app as a personalization platform where people will be able to live different lives during their one lifetime. So everyone can be anyone,” says Mogylnyi. “What’s the overall problem right now? People are scrolling content, not looking deep into it. And when I see people just using our app they always try to look inside — to look deeply into the picture. And that’s what really inspires us. So we understand that we can take the way people are browsing and the way they are consuming content to the next level.”

Robinhood announced this morning that it has raised $200 million more at a new, higher $11.2 billion valuation. The new capital came as a surprise.

Astute observers of all things fintech will recall that Robinhood, a popular stock trading service, has raised capital multiple times this year, including an initial $280 million round at an $8.3 billion valuation, and a later $320 million addition that brought its valuation to $8.6 billion.

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Those rounds, coming in May and July, now feel very passé in the sense that they are frightfully cheap compared to the price at which Robinhood just added new funds. D1 Partners — a private capital pool founded in 2018 — led the funding.

The unicorn’s new nine-figure tranche, a Series G, values the firm at $11.2 billion. A $2.6 billion bump in about a month is an impressive result, one that points to an inescapable conclusion: Robinhood is still growing, and fast.

How fast is the question. There are three things to bring up in this regard: Trading growth at Robinhood, the company’s soaring incomes from selling order flow to other financial institutions, and, oddly enough, crypto. Let’s peek at each and come up with a good why as to the new Robinhood valuation.

After all, we’re going to see an IPO from this company before the markets get less interesting, if it’s smart.

Growth

Robinhood is currently walking a line between enthusiasm that its trading volume is growing and conservatism, arguing that its userbase is not majority-comprised of day traders. The company is stuck between the need for huge revenue growth and keeping pedestrian users from tanking their net worth with unwise options bets.

It’s worth noting that Robinhood spent a lot of its funding round announcement email to TechCrunch talking about its users safety and education work. It makes sense given that we know that the company is seeing record trades, and record incomes from options themselves. After a Robinhood user killed themself after misunderstanding an options trade on the platform, Robinhood pledged to do better. We’re keeping tabs on how well it manages to meet the mark of its promise.

But back to the revenue game, let’s talk volume. On the trading front Robinhood has lots of darts. And by darts we mean daily average revenue trades. Robinhood had 4.31 million DARTs in June, with the company adding that “DARTs in Q2 more than doubled compared to Q1” in an email.

The huge gain in trading volume does not mean that most Robinhood users are day trading, but it does imply that some are given the huge implied trading volume results that the DARTs figure points to. Robinhood saw around 129,300,000 trades in June, which is 30 days. That’s a lot!

Over the past two years, the global supply chain has been hit with two major upheavals: the United States-China trade war and, more cataclysmically, COVID-19.

When Reefknot Investments launched its $50 million fund for logistics and supply chain startups last September, the industry was already dealing with the effects of the tariff war, says managing director Marc Dragon. Then a few months later, the COVID-19 crisis began in China before spreading to the rest of the world, disrupting the supply chain on an unprecedented scale.

Almost all industries have been impacted, from food, consumer goods and medical supplies to hardware.

Reefknot, a joint venture between Temasek, Singapore’s sovereign fund, and global logistics company Kuehne + Nagel, focuses on early-stage tech companies that use AI to solve some of the supply chain’s most pressing issues, including risk forecasting, financing and tracking goods around the world.

In March, around the time the World Health Organization declared the COVID-19 crisis a pandemic, Reefknot surveyed nine shippers about the challenges they face. While there are other macroeconomic factors at play, including Brexit and the oil price war, the survey’s main focus was on the combined effect of COVID-19 and the U.S.-China trade war on the supply chain and logistics industry.

According to the study, the main things shippers want is the ability to dynamically manage supply chain risks and operations and optimize cash flow between corporate buyers and their suppliers, who often struggle with working capital.

Many of the current solutions used in the supply chain involve a lot of manual tasks, including spreadsheets to predict demand, phone calls to confirm capacity on planes and ships and checking goods to make sure orders were fulfilled properly.

Verizon and Disney announced this morning that they’re extending and expanding a partnership that gives some Verizon Wireless subscribers access to Disney’s streaming services at no addition charge.

The companies announced last fall that Verizon (which owns TechCrunch) would be offering free Disney+ to unlimited wireless customers, and on an earnings call in February, Disney’s then-CEO Bob Iger said that around 20% of Disney+ subscribers came from Verizon.

More recently, the entertainment giant said that Disney+ had more than 60.5 million subscribers as of August 3.

With today’s announcement, subscribers to Verizon’s Play More and Get More Unlimited wireless plans will get free access to not just Disney+, but also Hulu and ESPN+. (Plus, Apple Music.) Disney normally charges $12.99 when these three streaming services are purchased together as The Disney Bundle.

“The addition of The Disney Bundle to our agreement with Verizon reinforces our commitment to providing their subscribers with access to high-quality entertainment from Disney+, Hulu and ESPN+,” said Disney’s executive vice president of platform distribution Sean Breen in a statement. “We are always looking for the most advantageous ways for consumers to experience our content and we are pleased to work with Verizon so that they can provide their customers with these appealing new offers.”

 

Apple is expanding its program that provides parts, resources and training to independent repair shops to now include support for Mac computers. The repair program was first announced last fall, with the goal of making it easier for consumers to repair their out-of-warranty iPhones by allowing them to use third-party shops, including small businesses, that would now have access to official repair parts and other tools.

The program was meant to complement Apple’s existing network of over 5,000 Apple Authorized Service Providers, like Best Buy, which handle both in- and out-of-warranty repairs. To some extent, the program arose from consumer demand. Many iPhone users were turning to unauthorized repair shops for a variety of reasons — perhaps the shop was closer to their home, could fix their device more quickly, or offered more affordable repairs, for example. But this choice could result in an uneven consumer experience as the shops were locked out from using official Apple parts.

Since its U.S. launch, the independent repair shop program expanded to over 140 businesses and over 700 new locations. This summer, Apple announced the program would now expand internationally as well, to both Europe and Canada.

To date, however, the program was only focused on iPhone repairs — not Mac. Going forward, these repair shops and others that qualify will be able to access Apple-genuine tools, repair manuals, diagnostics, official parts, and other resources they need to perform common out-of-warranty repairs on Macs, too. The program is free to sign up for and the repair training is also free, Apple says.

Reuters first reported the news of the program’s expansion. Apple also confirmed the details to TechCrunch, noting that the company believes the safest and most reliable repair is one that’s handled by a trained technician using official Apple parts. The company said, too, it wants consumers to feel confident that their repairs are being done correctly.

The news of the program’s expansion is timely, given that Apple’s stance on consumers’ “right to repair” their own devices is one of the many topics under investigation by the U.S. House Antitrust Subcommittee.

The subcommittee had last month held a hearing where it asked Apple CEO Tim Cook about his company’s position on a variety of matters, like its App Store and commission structure, for example. Though not a major focus of the Congressional hearing itself, the documents collected as part of the subcommittee’s investigation into Apple included internal emails that showed how the company was conflicted about its repair program and the Right to Repair legislation, which Apple had lobbied against for years.

In one email, Apple execs weighed telling a reporter about its then-forthcoming Genuine Parts Repair program to demonstrate its commitment to more consumer-friendly repair policies, the documents revealed, In others, Apple execs discussed how repair manuals had been published without clearance, indicating a lack of a cohesive strategy around its approach to repair policies.

By further expanding its independent repair program to now include the Mac, Apple benefits from not only better serving customers by expanding access to genuine parts, but also from redirecting the focus of the antitrust investigation away from this particular topic, at least, if not the others.