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Originally announced in June, changes to Apple’s App Store policies on its Sign in with Apple service and the rules around children’s app categories are being tweaked. New apps must comply right away with the tweaked terms, but existing apps will have until early 2020 to comply with the new rules.

The changes announced at Apple’s developer conference in the summer were significant, and raised concerns among developers that the rules could handicap their ability to do business in a universe that, frankly, offers tough alternatives to ad-based revenue for children’s apps.

In a short interview with TechCrunch, Apple’s Phil Schiller said that they had spent time with developers, analytics companies and advertising services to hear what they had to say about the proposals and have made some updates.

The changes are garnering some strong statements of support from advocacy groups and advertising providers for children’s apps that were pre-briefed on the tweaks. The changes will show up as of this morning in Apple’s developer guidelines.

“As we got closer to implementation we spent more time with developers, analytics companies and advertising companies,” said Schiller. “Some of them are really forward thinking and have good ideas and are trying to be leaders in this space too.”

With their feedback, Schiller said, they’ve updated the guidelines to allow them to be more applicable to a broader number of scenarios. The goal, he said, was to make the guidelines easy enough for developers to adopt while being supportive of sensible policies that parents could buy into. These additional guidelines, especially around the Kids app category, says Schiller, outline scenarios that may not be addressed by the Children’s Online Privacy Protection Act (COPPA) or GDPR regulations.

There are two main updates.

Kids changes

The first area that is getting further tweaking is the Kids terms. Rule sections 1.3 and 5.1.4 specifically are being adjusted after Apple spoke with developers and providers of ad and analytics services about their concerns over the past few months.

Both of those rules are being updated to add more nuance to their language around third-party services like ads and analytics. In June, Apple announced a very hard-line version of these rule updates that essentially outlawed any third-party ads or analytics software and prohibited any data transmission to third-parties. The new rules offer some opportunities for developers to continue to integrate these into their apps, but also sets out explicit constraints for them.

The big changes come in section 1.3 surrounding data safety in the Kids category. Apple has removed the explicit restriction on including any third-party advertising or analytics. This was the huge hammer that developers saw heading towards their business models.

Instead, Apple has laid out a much more nuanced proposal for app developers. Specifically, it says these apps should not include analytics or ads from third parties, which implicitly acknowledging that there are ways to provide these services while also practicing data safety on the App Store.

Apple says that in limited cases, third-party analytics may be permitted as long as apps in the Kids category do not send personal identifiable information or any device fingerprinting information to third parties. This includes transmitting the IDFA (the device ID for advertisers), name, date of birth, email address, location or any other personally identifiable information.

Third-party contextual ads may be allowed but only if those companies providing the ads have publicly documented practices and policies and also offer human review of ad creatives. That certainly limits the options, including most offerings from programmatic services.

Rule 5.1.4 centers on data handling in kids apps. In addition to complying with COPPA, GDPR and other local regulations, Apple sets out some explicit guard rails.

First, the language on third-party ads and analytics has been changed from may not to should not. Apple is discouraging their use, but acknowledges that “in limited cases” third-party analytics and advertising may be permitted if it adheres to the new rules set out in guideline 1.3.

The explicit prohibition on transmitting any data to third parties from apps in the Kids category has been removed. Once again, this was the big bad bullet that every children’s app maker was paying attention to.

An additional clause reminds developers not to use terms like “for kids” and “for children” in app metadata for apps outside of the Kids category on the App Store.

SuperAwesome is a company that provides services like safe ad serving to kids apps. CEO Dylan Collins was initially critical of Apple’s proposed changes, noting that killing off all third-party apps could decimate the kids app category.

“Apple are clearly very serious about setting the standard for kids apps and digital services,” Collins said in a statement to TechCrunch after reviewing the new rules Apple is publishing. “They’ve spent a lot of time working with developers and kidtech providers to ensure that policies and tools are set to create great kids digital experiences while also ensuring their digital privacy and safety. This is the model for all other technology platforms to follow.”

All new apps must adhere to the guidelines. Existing apps have been given an additional six months to live in their current form but must comply by March 3, 2020.

“We commend Apple for taking real steps to protect children’s privacy and ensure that kids will not be targets for data-driven, personalized marketing,” said Josh Golin, Executive Director of Campaign for Commercial-Free Childhood. “Apple rightly recognizes that a child’s personal identifiable information should never be shared with marketers or other third parties. We also appreciate that Apple made these changes on its own accord, without being dragged to the table by regulators.”

The CCFC had a major win recently when the FTC announced a $170M fine against YouTube for violations of COPPA.

Sign in with Apple

The second set of updates has to do with Apple’s Sign in with Apple service.

Sign in with Apple is a sign-in service that can be offered by an app developer to instantly create an account that is handled by Apple with additional privacy for the user. We’ve gone over the offering extensively here, but there are some clarifications and policy additions in the new guidelines.

Sign in with Apple is being required to be offered by Apple if your app exclusively offers third-party or social log ins like those from Twitter, Google, LinkedIn, Amazon or Facebook. It is not required if users sign in with a unique account created in the app, with say an email and password.

But some additional clarifications have been added for additional scenarios. Sign in with Apple will not be required in the following conditions:

• Your app exclusively uses your company’s own account setup and sign-in systems.
• Your app is an education, enterprise or business app that requires the user to sign in with an existing education or enterprise account.
• Your app uses a government or industry-backed citizen identification system or electronic ID to authenticate users.
• Your app is a client for specific third-party service and users are required to sign in to their mail, social media or other third-party account directly to access their content.

Most of these were sort of assumed to be true but were not initially clear in June. The last one, especially, was one that I was interested in seeing play out. This scenario applies to, for instance, the Gmail app for iOS, as well as apps like Tweetbot, which log in via Twitter because all they do is display Twitter.

Starting today, new apps submitted to the store that don’t meet any of the above requirements must offer Sign in with Apple to users. Current apps and app updates have until April 2020 to comply.

Both of these tweaks come after developers and other app makers expressed concern and reports noted the abruptness and strictness of the changes in the context of the ever-swirling anti-trust debate surrounding big tech. Apple continues to walk a tightrope with the App Store where they flex muscles in an effort to enhance data protections for users while simultaneously trying to appear as egalitarian as possible in order to avoid regulatory scrutiny.

Fair, the $1.2 billion startup backed by SoftBank that has built a smartphone-based car leasing platform that lets people takes cars for as little as one month, is making another acquisition in the ongoing consolidation of the short-term car rental market. It’s picking up Canvas, another platform for leasing cars, from its owner Ford Motor Credit, a division of the car giant Ford Motor Company that provides leasing and financing to dealers and customers.

The price and other financial details were not disclosed, but we have confirmed with Fair’s co-founder Scott Painter that it will give Ford an equity stake in his startup, so there are at least some shares involved. Canvas is a similar kind of business to Fair’s but significantly smaller.

Fair has about 45,000 subscribers currently in the U.S., with 3.2 million downloads across 30 markets, while Canvas has only around one-tenth of that (3,800 to be exact: one possible reason that Ford decided not to hold on to it) across San Francisco, Los Angeles and Dallas. While Canvas offered leases starting at three months, Fair’s start at one month, although Painter said that the average they have found are that consumers take cars for about 18 months, while those leasing for ridesharing use them on average for 12.

The Canvas business will continue to operate, but it will gradually switch over to the Fair brand in the coming months. Those who are currently on Canvas contracts will be given the option to switch over to Fair as those deals come up for renewal.

We have confirmed that Ford is not investing further into Fair with this acquisition — not yet, at least. “This is an opportunity to build a relationship,” he said.

While equity funding is always something that Fair is looking at, he added, the company more immediately is planning to announced further debt funding next week, he said. Fair raised hundreds of millions in debt and equity to date to expand to new cities and buy in more vehicles.

Fair is picking Canvas’s employees, technology and business in the deal, Painter said. The team will stay in San Francisco, where they are currently based, to help Fair expand its operations in the Bay Area and continue hiring. “It’s an important market for us for engineers and developers,” he added. This is Fair’s third acquisition, following Xchange Leasing, the leasing business of Uber, for about $400 million; and of rental car service Skurt, for about $50 million.

The move to Fair will be Canvas’s third home under its third brand.

The company was originally founded as ZephyrCar to tap the opportunity of providing cars to Uber and Lyft drivers among other lease markets. It then rebranded as Breeze to double down on ridesharing. Then, as those rideshare companies explored other options for leasing (including Uber’s own unprofitable foray into Xchange Leasing), it shut down, at which point the team and other assets were picked up by Ford and rebranded as Canvas. At that point, the company shifted to a more specific consumer focus to lease Ford, Lincoln, and eventually other makes of cars.

Over that time, it’s amassed a lot of knowledge and data about car leasing and building that into more efficient, on-demand services, a contrast with many of the traditional leasing services in the market today.

“Canvas’ mission is to provide customers with flexible access to the vehicle of their choice for an affordable monthly payment,” said Ned Ryan, CEO of Canvas, in a statement. “Our strong synergies with Fair make this a natural fit.”

Ford’s move was part of the automaker’s efforts to explore the future of transportation: we’re in the middle of a tectonic shift in the automotive industry where new innovations like ridesharing and autonomous vehicles, along with changing consumer demands, have changed the game when it comes to simply making and selling vehicles.

As Painter characterizes it, Ford’s ownership of Canvas was partly about exploring all of that — something that it will now continue to do as a shareholder of Fair.

“Canvas built an impressive business and we learned a lot about subscription services, fleet management and the technology that underlies both,” said Sam Smith, executive vice president of strategy and future products at Ford Credit, in a statement. “We are proud of the work that was done in support of Canvas and we wish the entire team the best of luck.”

Ford’s competitors — including GM, Daimler and more — have also made big investments and acquisitions in an effort to better understand the shifts, and to hopefully keep a sizeable business alive in the future, a pattern that is likely to continue.

“I think if you’re a carmaker today, you have to think about how the world is changing and how to serve consumers given the rise of smartphones and the changing business models of the automotive industry,” said Painter.

Bryn Mooser, co-founder of virtual and augmented reality studio RYOT, said he’s “hanging up my VR and AR hats to really focus on more, shall we say, traditional nonfiction storytelling.”

Back in 2016, Mooser sold RYOT to The Huffington Post and AOL (TechCrunch’s parent company, now known as Verizon Media), and he left RYOT at the end of last year. Today he’s announcing XTR, a production company focused on documentary films and nonfiction series.

The company’s name comes from the 16 millimeter camera that Mooser said was part of a “first wave” of tools making documentary filmmaking more accessible. With XTR, Mooser said he wants to continue that process.

“Technology is front-and-center of this revolution that’s happening,” he told me. “What’s happening in documentary films right now is a direct result of cameras getting cheaper,” making it easier for anyone to create a “beautiful, professional film.”

At the same time, he noted that documentary distribution was previously limited to art-house cinemas, HBO and “one row at your local Blockbuster.” Now, social media and streaming services like Netflix and Hulu have opened up new distribution channels that are bringing documentaries to broader audiences.

XTR will be based out of LA’s Echo Park neighborhood, in a warehouse that will serve as office, post-production facility and event space. And rather than operating like a traditional production company, Mooser said he wants XTR to take “more of a tech startup approach.”

He explained, “We have a vision to really scale it out: How do we work with a lot of new directors? How do we work with all the platforms? How do we think about audiences globally?”

That approach also involves outside capital. XTR said it’s already raised an undisclosed amount of funding from former AOL CEO Tim Armstrong, Airbnb co-founder Joe Gebbia, Franklin McLarty, Christina and David Arquette, Josh Kushner, Lyn and Norman Lear, Bryan Baum and Zem and James Joaquin.

While Mooser is officially unveiling the company today, he said it’s already developing eight documentaries (which will be announced later this year) with partners like Vice Studios, Futurism and Anonymous Content.

“There’s a real opportunity to have a new company in there, looking out for those new filmmakers, and [trying] to shift the power balance a little bit,” he said. “The way we do that is, we look for great talent and we empower them to do what they want to do … at every step of way.”

Ola, the largest ride-hailing service in India, said today its two-wheeler service — Ola Bike — is now operational in 150 Indian cities and towns and it intends to grow this business by three times in the next one year.

The eight-year-old SoftBank -backed firm said Ola Bike is enabling it to reach the “hinterlands of India,” and bring affordable and convenient on-demand transportation to millions of people. The two-wheeler business, which like the cabs business sees someone drive a passenger around, was launched in 2016 and has created livelihoods for close to 300,000 people in India.

The aggressive expansion of Ola Bike, which until last year was in mostly pilot stages in a handful of cities in India including Bangalore, represents India’s growing appetite for picking bikes over cabs and other transportation mediums as they rush through busy traffic to get to work.

A ride in Ola Bike costs as little as Rs 5 (7 cents) per kilometre. Uber, Ola’s chief rival in India, also maintains a two-wheeler business in India called Uber Moto. Uber Moto is available in fewer than a dozen cities in India. Both Ola and Uber also offer three-wheeler auto services in India.

In recent years, a number of startups including Bounce, Vogo, and Yulu have emerged in India and their two-wheeler rental services are now being used by tens of thousands of people — if not more — each day.

In a recent interview with TechCrunch, Bounce executives said the startup was clocking about 80,000 rides each day in Bangalore. Bounce offers a mix of gasoline and electric bikes on its platform.

Ola itself has committed about $100 million in scooter rental startup Vogo. Uber earlier this year partnered with Yulu to conduct electric bike trials in Bangalore. In a statement to TechCrunch, an Uber spokesperson in India said earlier this month that the pilot was still operational but declined to share more.

In a statement, Arun Srinivas, head of sales and marketing at Ola, said Ola aims to “impact over a million Bike-partners in the coming year.” He added, “Ola Bike has enabled citizens from the smallest of towns such as Chapra in Bihar to large metropolitan areas such as Gurgaon with access to quick, reliable and affordable mobility.”

It’s easy to think about mainframes as some technology dinosaur, but the fact is these machines remain a key component of many large organization’s computing strategies. Today, IBM announced the latest in their line of mainframe computers, the Z15.

For starters, as you would probably expect, these are big and powerful machines capable of handling enormous workloads. For example, this baby can process up to 1 trillion web transactions a day and handle 2.4 million Docker containers, while offering unparalleled security to go with that performance. This includes the ability to encrypt data once, and it stays encrypted, even when it leaves the system, a huge advantage for companies with a hybrid strategy.

Speaking of which, you may recall that IBM bought Red Hat last year for $34 billion. That deal closed in July and the companies have been working to incorporate Red Hat technology across the IBM business including the z line of mainframes.

IBM announced last month that it was making OpenShift, Red Hat’s Kubernetes-based cloud-native tools, available on the mainframe running Linux. This should enable developers, who have been working on OpenShift on other systems to move seamlessly to the mainframe without special training.

IBM sees the mainframe as a bridge for hybrid computing environments, offering a highly secure place for data that when combined with Red Hat’s tools, can enable companies to have a single control plane for applications and data wherever it lives.

While it could be tough to justify the cost of these machines in the age of cloud computing, Ray Wang, founder and principal analyst at Constellation Research, says it could be more cost-effective than the cloud for certain customers. “If you are a new customer, and currently in the cloud and develop on Linux, then in the long run the economics are there to be cheaper than public cloud if you have a lot of IO, and need to get to a high degree of encryption and security” he said.

He added, “The main point is that if you are worried about being held hostage by public cloud vendors on pricing, in the long run the Z is a cost-effective and secure option for owning compute power and working in a multi-cloud, hybrid cloud world.”

Companies like airlines and financial services companies continue to use mainframes, and while they need the power these massive machines provide, they need to do so in a more modern context. The z15 is designed to provide that link to the future, while giving these companies the power they need.

Veo, a Copenhagen, Norway-based startup that offers an “AI camera” to make it easier for amateur soccer clubs to video and stream matches, has raised $6 million in Series A funding.

Backing the round is U.S.-based Courtside Manager and France’s Ventech Capital. Veo says the new capital will be used to launch in the U.S.

Founded in 2015 by Henrik Teisbæk, Jesper Taxbøl and Keld Reinicke, Veo has set out to “democratise” the filming of soccers matches and training by negating the need for multiple camera operators and/or a vision mixer.

It does this by employing a 4K lens camera that records the entire pitch (it’s designed to be mounted on a 23 foot tripod for optimal view), coupled with its AI video technology that processes the resulting video. This sees Veo follow the action via virtual panning and zooming, to create a TV-like viewing experience.

As we’ve noted before, that does mean a portion of the image will often be cropped out, resulting in a loss of resolution overall. However, the idea is that by starting with 4K the video quality is more than sufficient for playback on smaller screens, such as smartphones and tablets.

“Our immediate goal is to establish a foothold for Veo on the U.S. market, and a lot of the investment will go towards achieving that,” Veo CEO Henrik Teisbæk tells TechCrunch with regards to the new funding round. “In the long term, we want to use our U.S. market presence as a stepping stone towards becoming a central player on the global football market, and to hopefully break into other sports”.

Teisbæk says the U.S. was chosen because one of the “biggest and most exciting” soccer markets, and North American soccer players, coaches, clubs and associations are very data driven and open to new technology. “That represents a huge potential for us,” he adds.

Meanwhile, Veo says that in the last year it has seen 25,000 games recorded by 1,000 clubs in 50 countries. The company now employs 35 people in its Copenhagen HQ, where it develops the Veo software and hardware.

With a new feature called Yelp Connect, Yelp is allowing users to go beyond customer reviews and see “what the restaurants have to say for themselves.”

That’s according to Devon Wright, Yelp’s general manager of restaurant marketplaces. He explained that with Yelp Connect, restaurants will be able to post updates about things like recent additions to the menu, happy hour specials and upcoming events. These updates are then shown on the Yelp homepage (which is already becoming more personalized), in a weekly email and on the restaurant’s profile page.

Consumers, meanwhile, can follow restaurants to see these updates, but Yelp also shows them to users who have indicated interest in a restaurant by making a reservation, joining its waitlist or bookmarking its profile.

Of course, restaurants are already posting this kind of information on social media, but Wright said Yelp allows them to reach “a high-intent audience” — people who aren’t just browsing for updates from their friends, but are actually looking to go out for a meal.

Guang Yang, the group product manager for Yelp Reservations and Waitlist, also noted that restaurants can set end dates for their Yelp posts, which could make them more comfortable sharing things like limited-time menus.

Yelp Connect will cost $199 per month for U.S. restaurants, but is available for a limited time at a price of $99 per month.

Wright described this is part of a broader evolution at Yelp, where “you don’t just want to discover a great restaurant, you want to transact [with] that restaurant.” So the company has added things like reservations, with Connect serving as “the final piece of that journey,” allowing restaurants to continue reaching out to consumers after their visit.

In addition to launching Connect, Yelp is also announcing an upgrade to its Waitlist feature, which allows consumers to see the current estimated wait time at a restaurant, and to join the queue directly from the Yelp app.

Yang said Yelp can now use real wait time data from a restaurant to predict the average wait at a given time — so if you want to get dinner tonight at 7pm, Yelp can tell how long you’ll probably have to wait. (These estimates are based on a party size of two; you’ll enter your real party size and get an updated estimate when you actually join the waitlist.)

Yelp is also using these predictions to power an additional feature called Notify Me. If you want to get seated a certain restaurant at a certain time, you can hit a button to get a notification that will prompt you to join the waitlist at right time — if you want to eat at 7pm, and the average wait time at 7 is an hour, then you’ll get a notification at 6.

Yang said the algorithm is “pretty sophisticated,” and even incorporates some of the common situations that can confound these estimates, like kitchen closing times, or popular restaurants that have long waitlist as soon as they open.

Still, he acknowledged that there will be times where the actual is different from what’s predicted, which may be challenging when you’ve told all your friends to meet you somewhere at a given time. But in those cases, he said most restaurants “acknowledge and understand, ‘Oh, something happened, wait time changed,'” and they’ll make accommodations if you show up later.

For those of you that diligently follow the hot startups to graduate from Y Combinator’s accelerator program, you might recall Middesk.

The company was amongst an exclusive subset of startups in YC’s winter 2019 batch to walk into demo day term sheet in hand. Top VCs, like Accel and Sequoia Capital, couldn’t wait until the team’s public pitch was complete to seed the company.

Middesk performs background checks, but not of people; rather, the startup helps companies identify business and regulatory risk in their customer base. Today, it’s announcing its first round of capital, a $4 million financing led by Accel’s Rich Wong, with participation from Sequoia. Founded by two early employees of another YC graduate, Checkr, which automates the pre-employment background check process for companies, Middesk chief executive officer Kyle Mack and chief technology officer Kurt Ruppel wanted to apply their learnings to a business identity product.

“What we’ve built from the ground up is a product to help companies understand who their customers are and what those customers do for their business,” Mack explains.

Selling a product in a traditional and heavily regulated industry, Mack says having top-tier, established venture funds Accel and Sequoia on board has made a big difference for the company. This is particularly interesting, given the round comes at a time in which competition for early-stage deals is greater than ever. More and more billion-dollar funds, Accel and Sequoia included, are moving downstream to purchase stakes in promising companies as early as possible, beating out seed funds by providing better terms and brand recognition.

Accel was also an early investor in Checkr, which most recently raised a $100 million Series C at a $900 million valuation, and was familiar with the Middesk team prior to the company’s formation: “One of the nice things about this job is if you have a chance to do it right, you can build relationships with people and work with them across multiple companies,” Accel’s Wong tells TechCrunch.

San Francisco-based Middesk is working with customers, including Checkr and Plaid, a well-financed leader in fintech, as well as smaller entrants to the B2B market, like the even more recent YC-grad Vouch, which sells business insurance to startups. Mack says they are particularly focused on payments, lending, payroll, expenses and credit businesses, or those with regulatory risk requirements.

“Effectively anyone that’s touching money that’s a B2B business has regulatory requirements to do what we do,” Mack said. “There is a whole new wave of companies applying consumer-style experiences to business products, but the risks they deal with, they aren’t designed to manage those risks at scale.”

With the infusion of capital, Middesk has grown its team from two to seven, creating engineering and operations teams in the process. In the long term, Mack cites Plaid and its proven ability to rapidly become the go-to tool for connecting applications to consumer bank accounts, as inspiration.

“We talk about this idea of becoming a single source for all the external signals you might want to have about a business,” he said. “Plaid has built a single place to get a host of transaction data of people and businesses. We think about Middesk as a single place to find high-quality and trusted information for a single business.”

Almost every company has a talent problem. It’s hard to find good employees, and once you do, to keep them happy. Today, Beamery announced a fully integrated platform to help solve that problem.

Company co-founder and CEO Abakar Saidov says that while drawing and retaining talent can provide organizations with a key strategic advantage, there has been a dearth of digital tools to help. “What we found was that there is no fundamental kind of operating system or system of record to be able to run that part of the business,” he said.

While there are point solutions for different parts of the process, Beamery recognized an opportunity to deliver a more complete platform. “We essentially built what we’re calling a talent operating system, which encompasses the core primary business objectives of what a company is trying to do with talent,” Saidov explained.

That involves a suite of tools with the three key components around attracting, engaging and retaining talent, which Saidov says lines up in a way like a sales and marketing process. The problem as he sees it, is that the tools available for sales and marketing lack a set of features companies need when it comes to talent.

Each of the three components of the Beamery solution have been designed with helping companies move through the talent workflow process. Attracting involves setting up micro sites for recruiting on the company website that are linked to Beamery along with an event planning tool for setting up something like a campus recruitment day.

The Engage component involves a talent CRM database and marketing tools, while the Retain piece is about helping employees apply for internal jobs and survey tools to get feedback throughout the process.

The solution also involves linking to other enterprise systems, so there is a middleware piece that enables companies to connect to other tools. Saidov said that prior to today’s announcement, the company offered the CRM and middleware pieces, but it recognized all along that it needed a more complete solution. It just took some time and money to develop it.

If you’re wondering how this could work with LinkedIn, he says that it co-exists with it. Just as sales people might find prospects in LinkedIn, then manage the customer relationship in a CRM tool, recruiters can find candidates in LinkedIn and manage the recruitment process in Beamery. (One of the company’s investors includes Microsoft Ventures. Microsoft bought LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion.)

The company has raised $40 million so far, according to Saidov, and today it has 160 employees based in London with offices in San Francisco and Austen.

San Francisco-based robotics startup Simbe just announced a $26 million Series A. The round was led by Venrock and features Future Shape, Valo Ventures and Activant Capital. The company is one of several looking to automate the process of providing retail inventory.

Simbe says the funding will go toward growing its headcount, exploring new markets and accelerating the deployment oof its existing robots. The news also finds Nest’s Tony Fadell, Venrock’s David Pakman and Pathbreaker Venture’s Ryan Gembala joining the startup’s board.

“Our investors, both previous and new, provide much more than financial support. They are advocates and trusted advisors who bring invaluable institutional knowledge to all facets of our business,” cofounder and CEO Brad Bogolea said in a release. “Both our equity financing partners and the SoftBank Robotics team are deeply aligned with Simbe’s vision to revitalize physical retail through data. We are at a pivotal time of growth and value their support as we continue to transform retail at a global scale.”

Simbe has been showcasing its inventory robot Tally since 2015. Soon after Lemnos made an investment in the company. Earlier this year, U.S. supermarket chain Giant Eagle announced plans to begin a pilot program, deploying Tally in select stores. That announcement came a week or so after Walmart announced its own plan to pilot robots from Pittsburgh-based competitor, Bossa Nova.

Other retailers using Simbe robots include Schnuck Markets,Decathlon Sporting Goods and Groupe Casino. Along with the Series A, Softbank Robotics is also providing an inventory financing agreement to help scale manufacturing for the company.