Category: UNCATEGORIZED

China successfully launched a combination Mars orbiter and rover early this morning, using a Long March 5 rocket that took off from Wenchang Satellite Launch Center on Hainan Island at 12:41 AM EDT. The Tianwen-1 payload it carries represents China’s first full-scale Mars exploration mission, after a prior partial attempt with a orbital Mars satellite called Yinghuo-1 failed to leave Earth’s orbit in 2011.

This is a major effort not just for China, but also for extra-terrestrial planetary exploration in general, because it includes the combination effort of both the lander and rover in one combined mission, with the plan to deploy the rover on land and have it communicate with the orbiter as it makes its way around Mars all in one trip.

Tianwen-1 is the second Mars mission to take off this month, following a successful launch earlier this week by the UAE from Japan atop a Japanese MHI rocket. That mission, ‘Hope,’ carried an orbiter designed to take atmospheric readings of the Red Planet’s atmosphere.

China’s mission includes a planned 90-day excursion for the solar-powered rover it carries, which will employ various instruments on board to take samples and readings including multispectral photography, surface composition, weather readings and magnetic field information. The orbiter will also use its own cameras and instruments to gather info, including spectrometer readings, radar and photography, and will also act as a relay station to get data from the rover back to Earth.

There’s still one more mission to Mars yet to go before this year’s close approach (the time when Earth and Mars are closest to each other in their relative solar orbits) ends: NASA’s Perserverance Mars rover launch. That’s set to take off on July 30, weather and conditions permitting. Perseverance is the successor to NASA’s Curiosity rover, and includes a number of new scientific instruments to seek evidence of ancient life, and attempt to gather samples to actually return to Earth. It’ll also carry a small autonomous helicopter, which will hopefully become the first powered aircraft to take off from the surface of Mars when it reaches the red planet.

Tianwen-1 is expected to reach Mars next February, after a multi-month passage, which is the shortest trip possible between the two planets based on their relative orbits.

On the back of a major security breach last week that saw a bitcoin scam ripple through some of the highest profile accounts on Twitter, the company today reported Q2 earnings that point to the ongoing struggle for ad-based social platforms to weather the pandemic storm while (ironically) handling record levels of traffic and the many growing pains that come with that.

Revenues came in at $683 million with a loss per share (GAAP) of $0.01, with both figures down on the same quarter a year ago, compared to analysts’ expectations, and on Twitter’s own guidance. Meanwhile mDAUs — Twitter’s own audience metric denoting monetizeable daily active users — reached a high of 186 million for the quarter.

Analyst consensus was for $700 million in sales, while Twitter expected a 27% higher figure. Adjusted EPS meanwhile was negative $0.16 (non-adjusted was negative $1.56) while analysts expected negative $0.01. For some context, in the same quarter a year ago Twitter reported revenues of $841 million on adjusted EPS of $0.20.

A further note on Twitter’s diluted EPS of negative $1.56: it stemmed from a net loss of $1.2 billion, and Twitter explained that this was in part due to a deferred tax asset valuation allowance of $1.1 billion and a non-cash income tax expense based primarily on cumulative taxable losses “driven primarily by COVID-19.”

The numbers underscore just how much advertising — which accounts for the majority of Twitter’s revenues — has taken a hit for the company despite the continuing surge of traffic and popularity for the site itself. That mDAU figure not only bettered Twitter’s figures last year of 139 million, but beat analysts’ average expectation of 173 million.

Advertising specifically accounted for $562 million of its revenues, down 23% on a year ago. Twitter noted that the pandemic and “civil unrest” that led to many advertisers pausing campaigns both contributed to the decline. The US, Twitter’s biggest market, saw a decline of 25% in ad spend.

It goes to show the disconnect not only between audience and advertising that still seems to exist — ads ultimately not only follow eyeballs, but the economy, and that has been in decline — but also the disconnect between financials and how a company is discussed in popular discourse.

That is to say, the big story with Twitter in the last three months has been the ongoing questions of quality, health and security on the platform, and how and whether should Twitter disable bad actors while still upholding free speech. That debate will continue for a long time to come, not just on Twitter but in the halls of government in the months ahead.

Its that focus on improving the product that CEO Jack Dorsey focused on in his statement on this past quarter’s performance.

“Our product work is paying off, with tremendous growth in audience and engagement,” he said. “We grew mDAU to 186 million, a 34% year over year increase in Q2, the highest quarterly year-over-year growth rate we’ve delivered since we began reporting mDAU growth.

“I also want to address the security issue Twitter suffered last week. We moved quickly to address what happened, and have taken additional steps to improve resiliency against targeted social engineering attempts, implemented numerous safeguards to improve the security of our internal systems, and are working with law enforcement. We understand our responsibilities and are committed to earning the trust of all of our stakeholders with our every action, including how we address this security issue. We will continue to be transparent in sharing our learnings and remediations.”

Ned Segal, the CFO, noted that the ad server rebuild should also help the company recover going forward.

“Despite the pandemic, brands have found innovative ways to join the conversation on Twitter to connect with their customers,” he said. “We have completed our ad server rebuild and are making progress accelerating our performance ads roadmap. With a larger audience and progress in ads, we are even better positioned to deliver for advertisers when the live events and product launches that bring many people and advertisers to Twitter return to our lives.”

More to come.

Amazon may join its global rivals Google and Facebook in backing one of Indian billionaire Mukesh Ambani’s ventures.

The American e-commerce giant is in preliminary talks to acquire a 9.9% stake in Reliance Retail, local TV news channel ET Now reported Thursday afternoon, citing unnamed sources.

Reliance Retail, founded in 2006, is the largest retail chain in India. It serves over 3.5 million customers each week through its nearly 10,000 physical stores in more than 6,500 cities and towns in the country.

Reliance Industries, which is the most valuable firm in India and runs Reliance Retail and Jio Platforms, declined to comment on the report. Amazon also declined to comment.

The reported talks between Amazon and Reliance Retail comes days after Ambani, who is India’s richest man, said several firms had expressed interest in backing the retail chain. Ambani’s other venture, Reliance Jio Platforms, has secured over $20 billion by selling 33% stake to more than a dozen investors including Facebook, Google, Silver Lake, and General Atlantic since April this year.

During Reliance Industries’ annual general meeting earlier this month, Ambani said the company will “induct global partners and investors in Reliance Retail in the next few quarters.”

Reliance Industries’ new venture JioMart is increasingly becoming a new challenger to Amazon, which has invested more than $6.5 billion in its India business, and Walmart’s Flipkart in recent months.

Morgan Stanley, which served as the financial advisor to Reliance Industries for Jio Platforms’ deals, recently valued Reliance Retail at about $29 billion.

Both Amazon and Reliance Retail, according to local media reports, have also been locked in a battle to acquire majority stake in Future Retail, India’s second largest retail chain.

Ceros is taking a big step up in fundraising today, with the announcement that it has raised a $100 million investment led by Sumeru Equity Partners.

Ceros provides a platform for clients like NBC, United Airlines, Snap, McKinsey, IBM, Condé Nast, JP Morgan, Red Bull and Pinterest to create what it calls “digital experiences” — basically, beautiful graphics and websites — without having to write any code. (You can see some of the best examples in the Ceros Inspire gallery.) It previously raised $33.5 million in total funding, according to Crunchbase.

SEP, meanwhile, is a technology-focused growth fund that’s backed companies like GoGuardian, Social Chorus and Talend.

Ceros CEO Simon Berg recalled that the firm’s partners have actually been “courting” him for the past two years. Those conversations started to get more serious, until the COVID-19 pandemic put them on pause.

Berg said he that as the country went into lockdown, he put a plan into place that ensured no one at Ceros lost their job — if cuts were needed, they would come in the form of across-the-board salary cuts. And he was impressed by the way the SEP team reacted.

“They were not screaming, ‘You should be cutting staff,’ none of the things I would expect,” he said. “They were cheering from the sidelines, which made me like them even more.”

And after the initial panic, Berg said he became “hyper-focused and energetic,” powered by his belief that “adversity and constraint is the birth of creative thought.” Apparently that optimism was borne out by increased activity on the Ceros platform, including the return of old customers.

“It’s been our opportunity and our mission to tell the world that digital experiences are as important as your physical experiences,” he said. So during a pandemic, “If your digital presence is your only presence, you’d better make sure [it’s] good.”

For his part, SEP’s Sanjeet Mitra said he was initially attracted to the company because it created “an enterprise-grade, easy-to-use, sophisticated tool that designers respect because it allows them to create fantastic content.”

In addition to SEP, Ceros’ existing investors also participated in the new round.

Moving forward, Berg said we can expect the creation of more products like the recently-launched design collaboration tool MarkUp, particularly as brands need to “craft experiences more rapidly, and you can’t do that if you’re sending PSD files across the internet via email.”

Mitra said the company also plans to use the new money to make acquisitions. (He emphasized that it won’t just be an indiscriminate roll-up strategy — an idea that prompted Berg to gag loudly — but rather will focus on products that Ceros customers actually want.) It will also fund continued international growth.

“Simon has the capabilities to be a global company leader and definitely a public company leader one day, if he wants to,” Mitra said.

The wider field of cyber security — not just defending networks, but identifying fraudulent activity — has seen a big boost in activity in the last few months, and that’s no surprise. The global health pandemic has led to more interactions and transactions moving online, and the contractions we’re feeling across the economy and society have led some to take more desperate and illegal actions, using digital challenges to do it.

Today, a UK company called Quantexa — which has built a machine learning platform branded “Contextual Decision Intelligence” (CDI) that analyses disparate data points to get better insight into nefarious activity, as well as to (more productively) build better profiles of a company’s entire customer base — is raising a growth round of funding to address that opportunity.

The London-based startup has picked up $64.7 million, a Series C the it will be using to continue building out both its tools and the use cases for applying them, as well as expanding geographically, specifically in North America, Asia-Pacific and more European territories.

The mission, said Vishal Marria, Quantexa’s founder and CEO, is to “connect the dots to make better business decisions.”

The startup built its business on the back of doing work for major banks and others in the financial services sector, and Marria added that the plan will be to continue enhancing tools for that vertical while also expanding into two growing opportunities: working with insurance and government/public sector organizations.

The backers in this round speak to how Quantexa positions itself in the market, and the traction it’s seen to date for its business. It’s being led by Evolution Equity Partners — a VC that specialises in innovative cybersecurity startups — with participation also from previous backers Dawn Capital, AlbionVC, HSBC and Accenture, as well as new backers ABN AMRO Ventures. HSBC, Accenture and ABN AMRO are all strategic investors working directly with the startup in their businesses.

Altogether, Quantexa has “thousands of users” across 70+ countries, it said, with additional large enterprises including Standard Chartered, OFX and Dunn & Bradstreet.

The company has now raised some $90 million to date, and reliable sources close to the company tell us that the valuation is “well north” of $250 million — which to me sounds like it’s between $250 million and $300 million.

Marria said in an interview that he initially got the idea for Quantexa — which I believe may be a creative portmanteau of “quantum” and “context” — when he was working as an executive director at Ernst & Young and saw “many challenges with investigations” in the financial services industry.

“Is this a money launderer?” is the basic question that investigators aim to answer, but they were going about it, “using just a sliver of information,” he said. “I thought to myself, this is bonkers. There must be a better way.”

That better way, as built by Quantexa, is to solve it in the classic approach of tapping big data and building AI algorithms that help, in Marria’s words, connect the dots.

As an example, typically, an investigation needs to do significantly more than just track the activity of one individual or one shell company, and you need to seek out the most unlikely connections between a number of actions in order to build up an accurate picture. When you think about it, trying to identify, track, shut down and catch a large money launderer (a typical use case for Quantexa’s software) is a classic big data problem.

While there is a lot of attention these days on data protection and security breaches that leak sensitive customer information, Quantexa’s approach, Marria said, is to sell software, not ingest proprietary data into its engine to provide insights. He said that these days deployments typically either are done on premises or within private clouds, rather than using public cloud infrastructure, and that when Quantexa provides data to complement its customers’ data, it comes from publicly available sources (for example Companies House filings in the UK).

There are a number of companies offering services in the same general area as Quantexa. They include those that present themselves more as business intelligence platforms that help detect fraud (such as Looker) through to those that are secretive and present themselves as AI businesses working behind the scenes for enterprises and governments to solve tough challenges, such as Palantir, through to others focusing specifically on some of the use cases for the technology, such as ComplyAdvantage and its focus on financial fraud detection.

Marria says that it has a few key differentiators from these. First is how its software works at scale: “It comes back to entity resolution that [calculations] can be done in real time and at batch,” he said. “And this is a platform, software that is easily deployed and configured at a much lower total cost of ownership. It is tech and that’s quite important in the current climate.”

And that is what has resonated with investors.

“Quantexa’s proprietary platform heralds a new generation of decision intelligence technology that uses a single contextual view of customers to profoundly improve operational decision making and overcome big data challenges,” said Richard Seewald, founding and managing partner of Evolution, in a statement. “Its impressive rapid growth, renowned client base and potential to build further value across so many sectors make Quantexa a fantastic partner whose team I look forward to working with.” Seewald is joining the board with this round.

Amazon’s India business said on Thursday it has begun offering auto insurance to cover two and four-wheeler in the country, marking American giant’s first foray into this financial services category globally.

The e-commerce giant said it had inked a deal with Mumbai-headquartered Acko General Insurance to offer customers car and motor-bike insurance. Amazon is also an investor in Acko.

Mahendra Nerurkar, chief executive and director of Amazon Pay in India, said on Wednesday evening at a fintech conference that the company was planning to expand its insurance service to offer coverage on health, flight, and cabs.

The auto insurance is available to customers through Amazon Pay on e-commerce giant’s website and app. The company said buying insurance will take less than two minutes and requires no paperwork.

“This coupled with services like hassle-free claims with zero paperwork, one-hour pick-up, 3-day assured claim servicing and 1 year repair warranty – in select cities, as well as an option for instant cash settlements for low value claims, making it beneficial for customers,” it added.

Customers who have subscribed to Amazon Prime, the company’s loyalty program that costs about $13 a year in India, will be able to access additional benefits and discounts, Amazon said without identifying those benefits.

India’s insurance market is the latest financial services sector that has attracted the attention of local and international tech giants. Paytm, India’s most valued startup, and its chief executive Vijay Shekhar Sharma, acquired insurance firm Raheja QBE for a sum of $76 million earlier this month.

In India only a fraction of the nation’s 1.3 billion people currently have access to insurance and some analysts say that digital firms could prove crucial in bringing these services to the masses.

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

“Our vision is to make Amazon Pay the most, trusted, convenient and rewarding way to pay for our customers. Delighted by this experience, there has been a growing demand for more services. In line with this need, we are excited to launch an auto insurance product that is affordable, convenient, and provides a seamless claims experience,” said Vikas Bansal, director and head of financial services at Amazon Pay in India, in a statement.

Though Amazon Pay is available in several markets, the payments service’s offering in India remains unmatched. The company has used the world’s second largest internet market, where it has invested more than $6.5 billion to date, as testbed to explore various unique opportunities. Amazon Pay app in India, for instance, also sells movie and flight tickets.

Cowboy has raised a $26 million (€23 million) Series B funding round from Exor Seeds, HCVC, Isomer Capital, Future Positive Capital and Index Ventures. The startup has been manufacturing premium electric bikes and selling them directly to consumers around Europe.

The company recently released the third generation of its flagship bike, which is all about refinements and iterating on its existing offering. If you haven’t seen one in a European city, it features an iconic triangle-shaped aluminum frame with integrated pill-shaped lights.

With a focus on simplicity, there are no gears or buttons to control motor assistance. The motor kicks in automatically when you start pedaling. Some of the key features of the Cowboy bike are the carbon belt, custom-made tires with a puncture protection layer and the detachable battery.

Cowboy bikes are also connected bikes thanks to some electronic components. For instance, you can lock your bike when you’re not using it. The company is currently testing auto-unlock, a feature that takes advantage of Bluetooth Low Energy to detect your phone.

By combining data from the accelerometer, the speed of the bike and your pedal power, Cowboy will also soon automatically detect crash and notify an emergency contact.

In addition to designing a bike, Cowboy is also a service company. It has built a network of repair partners and offers test rides to potential clients. It is now available in dozens of European cities.

The company also offers an insurance product thanks a partnership with Qover. For €8 per month, you can receive real-time notification whenever someone is trying to steal your bike and you’re insured against theft. For €10 per month, you’re also insured against damage.

With today’s funding round, the startup plans to hire over 30 people in the next six months, expand its network of test rides and scale production operations with Flex.

Flipkart said on Thursday it is launching a wholesale marketplace to serve small and medium-sized businesses and neighborhood stores in India, entering an increasingly crowded space that has attracted several players including India’s richest man, Lightspeed-backed Udaan, Amazon, and Facebook in recent years.

To launch the wholesale marketplace, called Flipkart Wholesale, the e-commerce giant said it was acquiring a 100% stake in Walmart’s India business, which had limited standalone presence in the country and operated Best Price cash-and-carry business that runs 28 stores across the country and has amassed more than 1.5 million members.

Flipkart, which has sold more than 80% of the business to U.S. retail giant Walmart, did not disclose the financial terms of the acquisition. Earlier this month, Walmart led a $1.2 billion financing round in Flipkart to increase its majority stake in the Indian firm.

Flipkart Wholesale, which will become operational next month, will use the e-commerce giant’s existing vast supply chain infrastructure and offer an “exhaustive” range of products and merchandise, as well as easy credit options and opportunities for additional income generation to neighborhood stores (locally known as kiranas) and other small businesses, the company said, adding it will also help these businesses with insights so that they can plan their inventory needs more effectively.

Kalyan Krishnamurthy, chief executive of Flipkart Group, said the acquisition of Walmart India “adds a strong talent pool with deep expertise in the wholesale business that will strengthen our position to address the needs of kiranas and MSMEs uniquely. With this development, the Flipkart Group will further build upon the synergies across its businesses to drive greater value and choice for end-consumers and businesses alike.”

Flipkart said it has already signed up top Indian brands, local manufacturers, and sellers across the country. The wholesale business — to be overseen by Adarsh Menon, a veteran at Flipkart, and Sameer Aggarwal, chief executive at Walmart India — will pilot services for the grocery and fashion categories next month. Aggarwal will leave his current position after the transition and will serve in a new role within Walmart.

“For over a decade, we’ve been committed to India’s prosperity by serving kiranas and MSMEs, supporting smallholder farmers and building global sourcing and technology hubs throughout the country. Today marks the next big step as Walmart India’s pioneering cash-and-carry legacy meets Flipkart’s culture of innovation in the launch of Flipkart Wholesale,” said Judith McKenna, president and chief executive of Walmart International, in a statement.

A handful of startups have attempted to build business-to-business marketplaces in India over the years. Lightspeed-backed Udaan has emerged as the largest player in this space, with its logistics network reaching 600 cities in India (and an additional 300 with third-party logistics providers). It was joined by a new contender this year.

India’s richest man Mukesh Ambani’s JioMart, a new e-commerce venture between the nation’s largest retail chain (Reliance Retail) and telecom network (Reliance Jio Platforms), began limited operations this April and has since expanded to over 200 cities and towns across India.

Facebook, which invested $5.7 billion in Reliance Jio Platforms earlier this year, said the two companies will explore ways to serve the nation’s 60 million small and medium sized businesses.

“These small businesses are critical to the Indian economy. If you look at Facebook as a company, there has always been a focus on helping these businesses,” Facebook India head Ajit Mohan told TechCrunch in an interview earlier this year. “These small businesses, first-time entrepreneurs and new ventures leverage the Facebook platform to find new customers and expand to additional markets.”

On Wednesday, WhatsApp said it plans to help digitize small businesses in India.

Neighborhood stores dot tens of thousands of cities, towns and villages in India. They have survived — and thrived, despite — retail giants’ billions of investment in the country. In recent quarters, both Flipkart and Amazon have rushed to collaborate with these mom and pop.

The COVID-19 lockdown around the world introduced online grocery to many shoppers for the first time, boosting an industry that had long drawn skepticism. In China particularly, the older generations often worry about buying perishable food without scrutinizing them in person.

Still, venture investors are bullish on the future of online grocery. One beneficiary is China’s Missfresh, which announced (in Chinese) Thursday a new funding round of $495 million led by a fund under state-backed China International Capital Corporation. Other backers were Tencent, Abu Dhabi Capital Group and Tiger Global.

By placing mini-warehouses closer to customers, the six-year-old startup is able to offer 30-minute delivery service to households in 16 cities.

Few players are able to compete in e-grocery, for the business requires early investment in large-scale cold chains and expensive user acquisition to make home deliveries profitable. Unsurprisingly, almost all forerunners in China’s online grocery are backed by or collaborate with an internet giant.

Missfresh is deeply integrated into Tencent’s WeChat messenger. Alibaba has its own in-house Freshhippo supermarket chain that comes with a delivery service. Restaurant delivery platform Meituan added grocery to its offering last year. Dingdong Maicai is a rare case without the backing of a major tech firm, seeking funds from venture capital institutions like Qiming Venture Partners and Gaorong Capital.

Some question how many new adaptors will stick to on-demand grocery shopping in post-lockdown life. Research suggests they may. China saw 11.6 million more daily active users of e-grocery in May compared to the same period a year before, according to research firm QuestMobile. Consumers may be hooked to the convenience, but those who see their corner stores shutter due to lost business during the lockdown don’t have a choice but to go digital.

Partipost, a Singapore-based marketing startup that lets anyone with a social media profile sign up for influencer campaigns, has raised $3.5 million in new funding. The round was led by SPH Ventures, the investment arm of publisher Singapore Press Holdings, with participation from Quest Ventures and other investors.

The funding will be used to grow Partipost’s current operations in Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan, and expand into Vietnam, the Philippines and Malaysia, other Southeast Asian markets with heavy social media usage. Since launching its mobile app in 2018, Partipost says it has added about 200,000 influencers to its platform, and that over the past 12 months, it has helped conduct 2,500 social media marketing campaigns for more than 850 brands, including Adidas, Arnott’s, Red Bull, Chope and Gojek.

According to benchmark report released in March by Influencer Marketing Hub, the influencer marketing industry is expected to be worth about $9.7 billion in 2020, with companies spending increasing amounts on social media campaigns and working with more “micro-influencers.” To serve them, the report said that more than 380 new influencer marketing agencies and platforms were launched last year, joining a roster of companies that already include AspireIQ, Upfluence, BuzzSumo, SparkToro and Inzpsire.me, to name just a few examples.

While most of these companies focus on helping brands identify the influencers with the widest social media reach, Partipost lets anyone sign up to take part in a campaign.

“Partipost’s main difference is that we believe that everyone can be an influencer,” founder and chief executive officer Jonathan Eg told TechCrunch. “Even if you have 200 followers, you can be one. We want to create a new market that we believe will be the future. Everyone can post on social media, write a review or give some feedback and be paid for it.”

“We want to empower everyone to monetize off their own data and influence and not just allow the big tech companies to do so,” he added.

Aspiring influencers browse brand campaigns on Partipost’s app and apply to take part by submitting a post draft. If the brand approves it, the user can then go ahead and post it on their social media profiles.

The amount of cash they earn is based on how much engagement each post receives. According to the company’s website, most campaigns require a minimum of 200 followers or more, and successful users can earn an average of $5 to $150 per campaign, depending on the brand’s payout structure.

One of Partipost’s selling points for brands is that it enables them to sign up thousands of influencers for a campaign in a single day, help them react quickly to online trends. Part of the funding will also be used to build data tools to help brands match campaigns with Partipost users more efficiently. The company says it expects to increase its base of aspiring influencers to one million within the next 18 months.

As part of the funding, SPH Ventures chief executive officer Chua Boon Ping will join Partipost’s board, while Quest Ventures partner Jeffrey Seah will become an observer.

In a media statement, Chua said, “Social influencer marketing is one of the fastest growing segments within Digital marketing. Hence, we are very excited to lead Partipost’s Series A round to further accelerate its growth. We are impressed by Partipost’s strong traction in Singapore, Indonesia and Taiwan as a young startup and look forward to partnering it to scale to new markets.”